New York, I’m with you mostly for your money

The word “exploitative” comes to mind.

Anyone remember that song, “Mambo #5”? Remember how bad it was, but how everyone you knew named Monica or Erica or Tina or Rita or Sandra or Mary or Jessica kind of had a thing for that song? And remember how it got to #3 on the charts?

It makes me suspicious when people give shout-outs in their art. Are they doing it because they really do love the object of their bullhorning, or are they including boisterous apostrophes toward popular names/places/things to make dough off those who also love them/are them? And what is “New York, I Love You” if not one giant shout-out to one giant city? Is this a proclamation of love for NYC, or is this an exploitation of the same?

At one point, as Gus (Bradley Cooper, forever the guy who played the asshole boyfriend in “Wedding Crashers”) stands outside The Slaughtered Lamb waiting for his new lover, I nudged my friend and said “Oh, I’ve been there quite a bit.” And then I knew I had totally fallen for it. Damn. Well, it’s human nature.

Comprising around a dozen narratives produced by different writers and directors, “New York, I Love You” gets its fragile coherence from three salient themes: New York City, Love, and Cigarettes. (Just kidding about that last one, but damn, I now feel like I have to start smoking to meet a nice girl around here. Or at least carry a lighter.) It’s difficult, therefore, to evaluate the movie as a whole. I did have my favorites, though.

The most enjoyable was the simple narrative of Mitzie and Abe on their 63rd wedding anniversary. Unlike most of the others, this Joshua Marston-directed vignette doesn’t take place in Manhattan, but on the way to Coney Island, where, after a relentless barrage of hilarious bickering and nagging (“Pick yah feet up!”), Mitzie and Abe watch the waves crash from the boardwalk in silence, content in their obvious and enduring love. That is, until some skateboarders nearly scare the old couple into voiding their bowels. The fact that Marston’s vignette unfolds in the less touristy area of New York makes it feel more authentic, at least to me. It didn’t feel like he was trying to capitalize on something.

But beautiful people in Manhattan isn’t necessarily unrealistic. It can happen.

Ethan Hawke, who’s been blessed with some of the finest filmic lovers in existence (Jolie, Delpy, Paltrow, Thurman, Tomei…), is denied an additional one in his slice of the film. His wildly audacious, logorrheic, and downright impressive courting of a beautiful woman outside a bar is classic, and is Hawke at his best. However, he’s at a loss for words when the woman informs him that she’s a prostitute, hands him a card, and tells him that, if he’s interested, weekdays are best.

Natalie Portman’s contribution, which she wrote and directed (but did not appear in), is a story of a mocha-skinned man played by dancer Carlos Acosta and a cute little girl having a day of fun in Central Park. Down by the fountain, two women tell him that he is “so good with her” and how hard it is to find a good Manny these days. After they explain that a “Manny” is a “male nanny,” the man nods and smiles. Shortly thereafter, he drops Maggie off with her mother and tells her that Maggie misses her. It then cuts to a scene is of this “Manny” performing a dance solo on stage in front of a large audience, the few seconds of which are just incredible–to the point where you will Youtube this dude. In the audience is Maggie, who we hear scream “Yay Daddy!” and then there’s that “ahh” moment where we’re supposed to realize we’re all racist.

Portman’s portion, surprisingly, was the only one that took on racial issues directly. There was another about forbidden cross-cultural love (which Portman starred in), but that one had to do more with religion than race. Given the diversity and tensions of New York, one would think that there would’ve been fertile ground for racial issues to be at least tangentially explored. Or, in short, WHERE ARE ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE? Compared to real-life New York, this movie was a bit of a whitewash. It also left out homosexual love, I realized, having attended this film with a heartbroken lesbian.

But then again, if the movie had included that stuff, I might’ve trashed it for being too PC.

The remaining vignettes ranged greatly in story and quality, covering everything from a “successful” prom night to a phone-only courtship to a role-playing married couple to a painter obsessed with a girl he sees in Chinatown to a weird story of a wealthy aging former singer and a slightly deformed bellhop (Mr. Shia LeBeouf, who actually wasn’t that bad) who may or may not have been a figment of her imagination. Some, like the prom story, are fun but shallow. Others try too hard for the label of “poetic” and miss the boat with overwrought dialogue. Even with the good parts, I couldn’t help but check my watch and wonder what the playing time was.

People will go see this movie, though. Because people love New York. And people love Love. It’s a formula. We can’t know what the motivations were for making this movie, but we do know that it was an unofficial follow-up to “Paris, Je T’aime” and will be unofficially followed-up by “Shanghai, I Love You” in 2011. Weird how these filmmakers have so much love for so many different citie$. (Oh whoops, a typo!)