While I was Streaming: New York, I Love You

The 2nd anthology film in the I Love You series this time stops in New York and the results are just as great as the Paris anthology, Paris, je t’aime.

The film follows a loosely connected group of individuals as we watch their experiences with love through a series of short films and connecting vignettes.  The stories involve a just dumped boy who gets a last minute prom date, a composer and an assistant who bond through their many phone calls, a couple of strangers outside a restaurant, a confident and tad overzealous smoker trying to pick up a not so forth coming women, a pick pocket and a girl that catches his eye, an jeweler and his client, an long lived and nagging couple, an assumed one night stand deciding to meet again, an aging star revisiting an old hotel, a painter and his longed for muse, a video artist capturing people around town, and the bond between father and daughter even if no one believes they are related. [Read more...]

Review: Amelia

Mira Nair’s latest is a dull, bland, and almost completely forgettable effort that while capturing the look, sound, and stories of Amelia Earhart it fails to create any drama, tension, or just about any emotion inside of us over it’s run time.
Spoilers ahead if you some how have know grasp on history.
Picking up at the launch of Earhart’s tragic flight around the world we will float back and forth through her life from the moment she met her future husband George Putnam and multiple stages along her fateful flight. Right here from the get go the film is in trouble. The relationships that begin to form in Amelia’s life are quickly glossed over and the film jumps forward through time at a fairly strong pace. Earhart’s relationship with Putnam manifests almost out of thin air and next thing we know they are married. Ditto for an affair that arises in the film and implies infinitely more than it shows. All this would be fine if we at all believed in their relationship, one that a certain Earhart biographer deemed the love her life, but instead comes across as really nothing very passionate at all. In fact the film fails to rouse any passion at all, be it in its heroine’s relationships, her supposedly death defying flights, or her impact on the culture of America and the fame that she garnered. [Read more...]

Review: The Namesake

Mira Nair has taken this adaptation of the novel of the same name and turned in a touching and entertaining movie that while remaining constantly enjoyable, never rises above being anything but pretty good.
Irfan Khan, Tabu, and Kal Penn share the lead in this movie with each giving us a fascinating look into Indian culture and the effect of raising a family in a country far from home can have on everyone involved. Ifran Khan is great as Ashoke Ganguli and we open the film with him in a train crash. [Read more...]