New York, I Love You (**1/4)

This is something you don’t see so much but seems to be becoming a little more common. It’s an omnibus film, a compilation of short films built around a theme. Lately there have been a few where the theme is a city, a recent example being Tokyo!, a three-films-in one release. Actually, New York Stories did the same sort of thing back in 1989. But this is closer in conception to Paris Je t'aime; both feature parts crafted by a number of writers and directors, loosely strung together as a feature.

So you get eleven different credited directors, some of whom wrote the segments also. The film is dedicated to the late Anthony Minghella, who wrote a segment featuring Julie Christie and Shia LaBoeuf in which the actress plays a singer. Like many of the segments, there is a twist ending, though for the most part they feel kind of forced. Possibly worst is the opening segment, in which two randomly placed-together strangers turn out to both be brilliant pickpockets, hamming it up to impress a woman. Like the city at its worst, it seems smug and false.

Besides the singer, there are a painter, a photographer, a composer, an actress, and a writer. No one is a banker or a slum dweller or a celebrity (well, maybe the singer is), but a lot of real-life celebrities play the characters. Orlando Bloom is the composer, Ethan Hawke the writer. James Caan plays the father of a wheelchair-bound girl who pays a kid to be her date. Either funny or crude, it will probably divide viewers the most. Natalie Portman appears in a Mira Nair-directed segment in which she plays a Hasidic Jew who’s about to be married, and also directs one about a father getting mistaken for his lighter-skinned daughter’s male nanny.

It’s a cliché, but the film adds up to less than the sum of its parts, with a so-what framing device sort of bringing them together. Except for the last segment, with Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman as a long-married couple walking in Brighton Beach, the movie doesn’t so much evoke the city as seem to serve as a clearinghouse for some experiments and small ideas by local talent. You can, in fact, make even a ten-minute segment compelling, but nothing here is anything more than mildly diverting.

IMDB link

viewed 10/13/09 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/27/09

Last Chance Harvey (***1/4)

Never surprising but always charming sums up this semi-comic romance. Dustin Hoffman is the divorced Harvey, and Emma Thompson the late-to-love Kate, an airline employee in London. There American Harvey has arrived for his daughter’s wedding. It is only a question of when and how Harvey and Kate will meet, and what Harvey will do about his job as a composer of jingles, which allows no time for a holiday, let alone a romance.

Rather than boring in its predictability, though, the movie feels comfortable like an old slipper. It’s familiar, but infrequently clichéd or sappy. Writer-director Joel Hopkins has not larded it up with potty-mouthed children, overly horny old people, or wisecracking pals. The only one-liner I noticed was the reference to Kate’s aging mother, who keeps calling during her blind date, as “human contraception.” (I’ve noticed how the cell phone has altered the course of romantic comedy. It has nearly ruined plots about people becoming disconnected—there’s one here that only works to the extent we believe that Kate and Harvey have failed to exchange numbers. Now the cell phone is a marker of annoyance, or of someone who is too busy, rude, or, like Harvey, too disconnected to interact with those in his presence.)

The thing that this movie makes me think is that, generally, speaking, the best romantic comedies are the ones that allow a bit of sadness to creep in. It’s in the forlorn look on Thompson’s face, when Kate feels left out of a conversation with the blind date’s younger acquaintances, or on Hoffman’s as Harvey tries to make conversation when he sees his daughter, who seems more comfortable with her father-in-law to be. The almost inevitable pairing in any romantic comedy represents, ideally, the end of a long stretch of disappointment, perhaps of romantic failure, perhaps of doubt that the happy ending would come, as this movie’s title suggests. It’s why people cry at weddings. Last Chance Harvey certainly isn’t given over to sad moments, but without psychoanalyzing lets us know these characters have known them. Most of all, though, it creates the feeling of serendipitously connecting with someone.

IMDb link

viewed 2/8/09 at AMC Plymouth Meeting; reviewed 2/8–10/09

Copying Beethoven (**1/4)

? A young composition student (Diane Kruger) struggles to win over her sexist, cantankerous, nearly deaf boss (Ed Harris), who also happens to be the most celebrated composer in 1824 Vienna.

+ The scenes that shed light on the compositional process are the best. Fans of the 9^th Symphony and the Grosse Fuge, which figure heavily in the plot, will enjoy hearing those pieces.

- Considering that screenwriters Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson previously collaborated on Nixon and Ali, and that director Agnieszka Holland made the heart-rending Europa Europa, this is a surprisingly lightweight movie. Notwithstanding the period setting, it reminded me of nothing so much as Scent of a Woman. All you needed was Ed Harris saying “Hoo-hah!” As we already know from the opening sequence in which the great composer appears dying, the young lass will wear away the old man’s crusty exterior, and he will impart his wisdom, etc. There’s hardly anything else to the story. Minor characters (her boyfriend, his nephew) come and go, and then the movie just ends. Rather strangely, even though Kruger is German, she speaks with an American accent, one of the things that lessened the authenticity.

= **1/4 Harmless, fictional fluff. Despite my objections, it’s consistently pleasant. Watch it if you like seeing Ed Harris chew the scenery, but not to learn about Beethoven.

IMDb link

viewed at PFS screening