New York, I Love You, But “New York, I Love You” Is Bringing Me Down

Sore Eros – Smile On Your Face

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To be fair, there were two commendable shorts, a few fallen eyelashes of well-crafted composition effectively conveying love (and cinematic reverence) for New York.

Regardless of these triumphs, New York, I Love You largely reads like a poorly-shot documentary interspersed with bland fictional scenarios driven aimlessly by even blander fictional characters.

And for a film to portray New York as an amalgam of sad, socially-stunted beasts, to make it devoid of any vivacity, to display, with confounding nonchalance, the passion, anguish, and ambition churning in the stomachs of so many residents and commuters alike — to essentially rob this city of its bellow — appears such an egregious oversight, one has to wonder from what devastatingly uninspiring New York these directors hail.

What lackluster imagination could have yielded such apathetic results?

Why bother creating a film that centers not around plot, nor image, nor sound, but instead lies entrenched in sentimental tripe, ploys intended to tug on store-bought heartstrings, lethargic twists, and the occasional ratty punchline? Even the cliche depictions of the city’s monuments would have been less offensive had they not managed to somehow completely avoid capturing any of what makes the natural and architectural marvels of New York so unequivocally inspirational.

I’ll overlook the fact that, as far as these filmmakers are concerned, New York consists almost exclusively of two boroughs, but to narrow their scope so sharply and still fail to establish any cohesion constitutes an embarrassing shortcoming on their part.

The biggest tragedy is that this film could easily have been titled “Anywhere, I Visited You Once,” and that a similar “New York, I Love You” could have been produced by anyone with a smattering of stock footage and a map of lower Manhattan.

Hey, at least we learned Shia LaBeouf knows how to limp.