New York, I Love You (2009)

NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU  (2009)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Fatih Aikin, Yvan Attal, Randall Balsmeyer,
    Mira Nair, Allen Hughes, Shunji Iwai,
    Wen Jiang, Shekhar Kapur, Joshua Marston,
    Natalie Portman, Brett Ratner
    C: Natalie Portman, Andy Garcia, Orlando Bloom,
    Hayden Christensen, Christina Ricci, Maggie Q,
    Ethan Hawke, James Caan, Julie Christie,
    John Hurt, Shia LaBeouf, Chris Cooper,
    Robin Wright Penn, Eli Wallach, Cloris Leachman,
    Irfan Khan, Anton Yelchin, Bradley Cooper
A follow-up to "Paris Je T'aime", a collection of short films by different directors, all dealing in some way with love (or sex) and relationships, and all set in New York. The stories are slight. Some are just fragments, a moment or two long. Sometimes they overlap. More often they don't. With maybe a few exceptions, there isn't much going on in them that's specific to the location. Characters like these could be doing essentially the same things in any big city in the world. Maybe that's the point. But it leaves you with a sense that the filmmakers missed something, too: the elephant in the room, New York City. Highlights: Cloris Leachman and Eli Wallach as an elderly couple out for a walk, a cross-cultural piece about a pair of diamond traders played by Natalie Portman and Irfan Khan, and two twisted jokes that play out around people smoking cigarettes, one starring Chris Cooper and Robin Wright Penn, the other with Maggie Q and Ethan Hawke.