Is it just me, or has the "At the Movies" gig loosened up A.O. Scott's writing -- made it more conversational? More fragment-y? For example, his review of New York, I Love You in today's NYT reads as though it's meant to be read aloud, preferably in the presence of Michael Phillips. Try it and see.
... Not that the 11 shorts in “New York, I Love You” are all that bad. It’s a nice-looking city, after all, even if the interstitial skyline and traffic montages assembled by Randy Balsmeyer are about as fresh as the postcards on sale in Times Square. Each vignette was shot in two days, and the roster of directing talent includes Mira Nair (“The Namesake” and the forthcoming “Amelia”), Fatih Akin (“Head-On” and “The Edge of Heaven”) and Natalie Portman, making her debut behind the camera. (She also plays a Hasidic diamond broker in Ms. Nair’s contribution.)
But in spite of some attempts at human and neighborhood variety, the stories have a self-conscious sameness, as if they were classroom assignments in an undergraduate fiction-writing class. Which, in a way, they are. Each filmmaker seems to have staked out a different part of town, though only one, Joshua Marston (“Maria Full of Grace”), has ventured beyond the tourist-friendly precincts of Manhattan. Apparently nobody loves Queens, the Bronx or Staten Island. Or Harlem, for that matter. And while the ideas of love explored on the East and West Sides are sometimes platonic, parental or intergenerational, they are also predominantly white and heterosexual....
I half expected it to end with a "Skip it."
While we're gossiping about Times film critics, I have to mention a relatively recent comment made on a very old post -- 2004! -- that claims Manohla Dargis is a Ph.D. candidate in film studies at UCLA?!1! Anyone have a line on this? The cinetrix is all for book larnin', but the practicalities of such a move otherwise escape me.
