New York Stories

Rating:
Summary: Two out of three ain't bad.
Review: This trilogy of N.Y.C. vignettes opens with a brilliant examination of an artist. Martin Scorceses' "Life Lessons" explores the brutal intensity of the creative process. Nick Nolte is compelling as the narcissistic Doby Lyons, a painter who's productivity is dependent upon turbulent relationships with women. Rosanna Arquette brilliantly portrays Lyons' assistant, a young woman struggling to find her own identity in the N.Y.C. art community. As always, Scorceses delivers intense imagery and a powerful soundtrack. This short film is more than worth the video's purchase price. By contrast, Francis Ford Coppola's "Life Without Zoe" is a poor adaptation of Kay Longworth's children's classic, "Eloise." Eloise is a child of privledge who lives in the Plaza under the supervision of her Nanny. The story is charming because Ms. Longworth retains the child's innocence. Mr. Coppola fails at this task; Zoe is a nauseating, self-concious, precocious, snob. I would strongly advise viewers to fast forward over "Zoe." Any merit the film has is overshadowed by the objectionable child. Woody Allen's "Oedipus Wrecks" meets the high expectations one has for the director. It is clever and funny though not very new. A strong "B". Like N.Y.C., one must take the good along with some bad in this movie; it is well worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Two out of three ain't bad.
Review: This trilogy of N.Y.C. vignettes opens with a brilliant examination of an artist. Martin Scorceses' "Life Lessons" explores the brutal intensity of the creative process. Nick Nolte is compelling as the narcissistic Doby Lyons, a painter who's productivity is dependent upon turbulent relationships with women. Rosanna Arquette brilliantly portrays Lyons' assistant, a young woman struggling to find her own identity in the N.Y.C. art community. As always, Scorceses delivers intense imagery and a powerful soundtrack. This short film is more than worth the video's purchase price. By contrast, Francis Ford Coppola's "Life Without Zoe" is a poor adaptation of Kay Longworth's children's classic, "Eloise." Eloise is a child of privledge who lives in the Plaza under the supervision of her Nanny. The story is charming because Ms. Longworth retains the child's innocence. Mr. Coppola fails at this task; Zoe is a nauseating, self-concious, precocious, snob. I would strongly advise viewers to fast forward over "Zoe." Any merit the film has is overshadowed by the objectionable child. Woody Allen's "Oedipus Wrecks" meets the high expectations one has for the director. It is clever and funny though not very new. A strong "B". Like N.Y.C., one must take the good along with some bad in this movie; it is well worth it.

Rating:
Summary: New York, the unperishable
Review: Three directors to approach the diversity of New York.
Scorsese depicts the life of a painter in this city. He is a cannibal and needs to possess a younger woman, slightly artistic to find his momentum and his inspiration. He is the absolute vampire who sucks life out of her till she rebels and goes away, but he needs this resistance for inspiration to work.
Coppola looks at the city through the eyes of a young girl, the daughter of an internationally famous photographer, her mother, and an internationally famous flutist, her father. She lives in that rich world without any parents with her most of the time and finds a sudden pleasure when she can take a plane with her mother to fly to a concert of her father's somewhere in the wild wide world. Is that a life for a child ? It sure is the life of the children of that class of world-wide artists and celebrities and New York is an excellent base for them to grow somewhat normally.
Woody Allen goes back to his obsession of a Jewish possessive mother who cannot accept her son to be an independent person. She meddles and the trick is her disappearance and reapparition in the sky of Manhattan talking for weeks to everyone in the street and developing a consciousness of everyday life problems. New York, in that vision, is seen as the ultimate mother and the primeval family.
New York is thus shown as a multifarious entity where people live in a world of their own, a world suspended in mid air, somewhere in another space and time. Outlandish, eerie and fascinating. Nothing can destroy a city like this, and the vision of the twin towers of the WTC are there to remind us of that absolute perennity in resurrection if necessary...