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!)

Long-winded on “Watchmen”

Watchmen’s dark refrain is that “It’s all a big joke.” I think they’re talking about life, the world, existence, etc. But I’ll tell you what the real joke was: giving us all free 20oz. Coca-Colas at 10:00 in the morning then sitting us down for a two-hours-and-forty-minutes movie that you don’t want to take your eyes off of.

Real funny, you clowns.

Kidding aside, I was lucky enough to see “Watchmen” a day early and for free, thanks to some folks at work. I was definitely planning on seeing it anyway, so now I can take that $12 and spend it on something nice, like fancy cheese, or an ironic belt buckle.

After enjoying a book so immensely, there’s never a question, for me, about seeing the movie. Even if I’m completely sure there’s no way I won’t be disappointed (see: Everything is Illuminated), I will still see it—in theaters—if only so that I can mount my literary high horse and berate it.

The problem with writing about these films is that I no longer end up writing about the film; I end up writing about the adaptation. Which I’ll do once again. I have very strong opinions concerning adaptations, the gist of them being that movies adapted from complicated, cerebral, or non-linear works should, at most, be “inspired” by the original. Any attempt at re-creation in those cases usually has a result of desecration. It’s people-pleasing at its most lethal.

I can understand the director Zach Snyder’s choice to follow Watchmen almost panel-by-panel. If he hadn’t, he would’ve had fanboy feces all over his doorknobs every day for the next eight months. Divergence from an iconic work with such frothingly devoted fans is more than just risky—it’s masochistic. So, just as I would, he played it safe.

The result, while a decent and entertaining movie, will not (and should not) achieve the same kind of shelf-life and iconic status that its storyboard namesake has—nor the iconic status that C. Nolan’s Batman movies enjoy. I heard a few of my colleagues comparing “Watchmen” to “Dark Knight.” I don’t think that’s fair. The people behind “The Dark Knight” didn’t face the same sort of pressures. It was based on a character, not on a book, so the director and the writers had much more freedom to create in their own medium without fearing for their lives and porches.

Reviewer after reviewer has been saying that the opening-credits sequence is the best part of the film. My theory is that this is because they are all older than me. The theme of the credits is Costumed Heroes Throughout the 20th Century. So there’s costumed heroes taking Marilyn’s place in Andy Warhol prints, knocking off JFK, landing on the moon, etc. It’s probably more interesting for the older crowd, who was actually around for that stuff. My earliest memory of a national event is when the Pistons won the Championship in ‘89.

Personally, I enjoyed the visuals most. The image of Dr. Manhattan striding through the Vietnam fields and disintegrating people was awe-inspiring, the murder of the Comedian was strangely beautiful, and the Mars scene was a spectacle superior to anything in any other comic book movie.

Trumping all, though, unfortunately, was a sense of obscuring gratuitousness. It’s almost unfair to say, since the book could also probably be called “gratuitous,” but looking at cartoon panels of a man having his arms sawn off or a hatchet entering a man’s skull is different than watching it unfold in front of you in live-action. As a rule, the “Watchmen” cameras are not shy. They linger, maybe to their detriment, every time. Another form of gratuity lay in the unsubtle and seemingly aimless symbolism: the “Obsolete Models” sign hanging in the car lot from which Night Owl and Laurie Jupiter emerge,  or the way Rorschach’s splattered body made a Rorschach blot on the snow.

It’s difficult to say the film “tried too hard,” because ”trying too hard” is inevitable when working with material this lofty–well–lofty in some circles. It wants so bad to be iconic. You can tell by the music they chose: ultra-well-known anthems from a few generations ago (some of them odd…99 Luftballoons? What?). But it won’t make it, as pretty as it looks and as profound as its themes may be.  Alan Moore had a case when he claimed Watchmen was not meant for this medium. The dialogue sounds funny spoken aloud. The novel’s ironic self-consciousness is gone. Its subtlety is gone. And there are too many distractions.

Mr. Snyder made a valiant effort and did a respectable job, but, unlike its source material, it can be forgotten.

It’s not the years, Honey. It’s the mileage.

I was just very opposed to this whole thing. Not like hunger-strike opposed, but a little more than just annoyed. The new “Rocky” installment last year annoyed me. “The Land Before Time 17” annoyed me. “Basic Instinct 2”—well, that was just comedy gold. But this? Did they really have to? Indiana Jones?

The third one was called “The Last Crusade.”

“LAST.”

I took that to mean that there weren’t to be any more Indiana Jones adventures.

And I was fine with that. The existing three were beautiful and timeless things.

But I get it now—that “crusade” was used in the narrower, historical sense of the word. Middle ages. Grail. Nazis are bad. I get it. The fourth is here. I blame semantics.

I had to blame something. It has been nineteen years since “The Last Crusade.” In movieland, it’s the 50’s. Dr. Marcus Brody is dead. Professor Henry Jones the First is dead. (Wait: didn’t he sip from the Holy Grail? Whatever.) The atomic bomb has been invented. Suburbia has risen. Preppies hate Greasers. Communism looms. And the Soviets want an ancient crystal skull—Mayan—which happens to be curiously elongated and severely magnetic. Allegedly, its possessor wields unknown powers! So the stiff-chinned Soviets abduct none other than Dr. ‘Indiana’ Jones to help them find it.

You can probably guess at what happens from here. Indy escapes. He discovers that his old friend—who has been raving incoherently about Akator (also known as El Dorado) and some mysterious skull—is being held captive in South America. He sets out to free him (and to, of course, find the damn artifact). He’s followed. He’s captured. He’s followed again. Then he’s captured again just after a major discovery. Et cetera. People with guns and accents. It’s the Raiders formula—not that we’re complaining. It’s very predictable, is all. And it used to be very endearing.

Somehow, though, the charm is lost with this new installment. I found it more difficult to suspend my disbelief. Especially when young Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf, “Transformers”) starts swinging on vines through the jungle and manages to head off a pair of speeding vehicles. Or when Indiana gets caught in a nuclear test-blast but survives by locking himself in a lead-lined refrigerator.

But the other films had scenes like this too. Why didn’t it work as well this time?

It may just be the prevailing aesthetic of the “right now.” Recently, Hollywood’s revamped James Bond by making it more realistic. Before that, they revamped Batman by making it more realistic. But, at the same time, we’ve seen a rise in popularity of the outrageously unreal—300, Beowulf, Kingdom of Heaven, Wanted. Just like in politics, there’s a move toward polarity, extremes. A plotting of the “realism” points might look like cellular mitosis. Maybe there’s no room in the middle anymore for a dusty, ophidiophobic hero whose lips bleed right alongside magical crystal skulls and twenty-something Tarzans.

Then again, maybe the whole “alien” thing threw me off. Among the things Harrison Ford is not, there’s Will Smith.

All this is not to say that the movie was completely without merit. A few well placed one-liners were enough to show that Indiana hasn’t lost his wit. And Spielberg, in general, knows how to direct. The movie runs almost seamlessly, bounding along to the timeless John Williams score, and is packed with the razzle-dazzle action sequences we’ve come to expect.

Comparisons are inevitable. The guy in front of me was really upset. The girl next to me was pleasantly surprised. In the end, neither was reacting to “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.” They were reacting to “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull” vs. its predecessors. The fairness in this is questionable, but they must have known what they were facing. It’s a tall order to dust off something so colossal as Indiana Jones and present it anew. Antiques don’t always function so well. But if we’ve learned anything, they’ve got some monetary value.