One good, one awful

Over the Labor Day weekend I watched two movies. One I liked so much that I watched it once at night and then again the following morning. Movies and books, I’ve found, occur differently depending upon the time. ‘New York, I Love You’ was so appealing to me that I could have watched it a third time, but I wanted to get it in the mail in time for the 10:00 a.m. pickup in order to keep the Netflix rotation rotating.

‘Shrink,’ on the other hand, was so appalling that I didn’t even finish it. The storyline goes something like this: a Hollywood psychiatrist, played by Kevin Spacey, smokes a lot of pot, which concerns his friends and family. At an intervention they stage he admits that his wife didn’t die in a car accident: she committed suicide. One of his clients, played by Robin Williams, tries to disguise his alcoholism with sex addiction. Another – and the cheap construction of this character is perhaps the centerpiece of the film’s utter stupidity – is an agent of some sort who is obsessed with end-of-the-world scenarios: natural disasters, germs, that sort of thing. He’s so quirky! So neurotic! Then, the psychiatrist takes on a pro bono patient, a black high school girl whose mother, like the good doctor’s wife, also committed suicide. They discover this together and then things begin to change. They discover they both love going to the movies on weekday afternoons. Although I hit ‘stop’ before it happened, I’m guessing the psychiatrist hooked up with one of his patients. As I write this it occurs to me that it doesn’t sound so bad, but trust me, it was. It was a movie by Hollywood about Hollywood. Everyone felt so alienated, so alone. Oh, the angst of success! What everyone needed and wanted was just a good old-fashioned authentic connection. There wasn’t a line of originality to be found in this film. Perhaps the whole thing was a 97-minute long inside joke on the industry. What’s really strange to me about this movie isn’t the film itself – which is dreadful all on its own – but the fact that it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. I thought that was for only the good ones. Certainly there is no shortage of really schlocky, self-indulgent movies that are built on more clichés than I can count, but how does one manage to debut at Sundance? In this case, certainly not by merit.

If I were in the business of making movies, ‘New York, I Love You’ is one I’d like to make. The only problem with making a movie like this, I suppose, is that it’s not just one movie: it’s 11 or 12, made by as many different film makers. They’re all love stories, of course – ranging from a teenage couple at the prom to a hauntingly beautiful, out-of-sequence montage of an opera singer’s stay at a hotel at different stages in her life – but the main character in all of the stories is New York itself. It’s gorgeous to watch. To me, the physical setting of a film is as important as the actors or the plot (and usually more so) and in ‘New York, I Love You’ the visuals delivered. There were plenty of shots of gigantic bridges and the skyline, of course, but there were even more panoramas that I suppose could have been shot in any big city but that somehow all had a very New York vibe about them. The stories overlapped from time to time, and a couple of them actually intersected, but what differentiated this movie from ‘Shrink’ is that it wasn’t hokey. To me, the characters were recognizable enough that I could imagine running into them in New York (or in Portland, for that matter); at the same time, they weren’t so recognizable as to be predictable. I had no idea from one scene to the next what was going to happen, and yet I was willing to go along, not once but twice.