CREATIVE QUOTIENT
The film is a potpourri of stories about an assemblage of colorful characters, who find that eight minutes is quite enough to make an impression, and New Yorkers would agree. It is also a challenge to say it all in eight quick minutes, but then in New York that’s enough time to make an impression.

In the very first segment, directed by Jiang Wen and starring Hayden Christensen and Rachel Bilson meet in a bar, where he finds a cellphone that she left behind. He opens a seductive conversation, interrupted by Andy Garcia as her boyfriend, who immediately reads the other guy. The two of them elevate their confrontation to a level of sly expertise, in a way that is rather remarkable. Once can’t ignore the O’Henry tinge.

Another O’Henry touch comes in Yvan Attal ‘s segment starring Maggie Q and Ethan Hawke , as two people who meet outside a club. He is determined to seduce her, and launches an impressive improvisation involving his sexual skills and uses. This spiel could work one of two ways: as a serious come-on, or as a display of sheer wit. It fails at both, for reasons he failw to suspect.

Joshua Marston’s segment starring Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman is a warm look at octogenarian romance. They’ve been married since forever, and now they’re taking a walk at Coney Island. “Pick up your feet!” she tells him. “I am picking them up!” he says. “You’re shuffling!” she says.

The others include Shunji Iwai’s piece about a sleep-deprived composer, Orlando Bloom, carrying on a ‘phone flirtation with his director’s unseen assistant. Shekhar Kapur conjures up a few moments of surrealism with his take on an Upper East Side ghost story by the late Anthony Minghella (featuring Shia LaBeouf as a hunchbacked bell-hop), while Brett Ratner’s comic prom-night ode to teen hormones and Central Park features James Caan.

Mira Nair’s Diamond District fable that fulfills the film’s purpose is also among the best. Natalie Portman (who also writes and directs a later, lesser segment) plays an Orthodox Jewish woman negotiating a diamond sale with a Jain dealer (Irrfan Khan in rare form). Over the course of a few minutes, the densely- packed script (courtesy journalist Suketu Mehta) covers language, dietary restrictions, religion, love; all of it delivered with a matchless narrative punch.

Inspiration strikes an artist (Turkish actor, writer and director Ugur Yucel), when he spies a delicate, reticent young Chinese woman (Taiwanese star Shu Qi ) working in an herbal tea shop and tries to make her his muse. At first he tries to paint her from memory, but her eyes defy his recollection, so he returns to ask if she will model for him. Touched but confused about why he has chosen her, she refuses. But fate changes everything when the artist becomes ill - and the Chinese woman discovers his final works, portraits of her that miss one crucial element: the expression in her eyes.

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE
Following on the heels of its critically-acclaimed predecessor, Paris Je T’aime, New York, I Love You, is the second in a series of films that producer Emmanuel Benbihy calls Cities Of Love, which will take audiences through the world’s much-loved and culturally-influential cities via the sheer power of heartfelt emotions. The next cities in development are Rio and Shanghai for 2010 and Jerusalem and Mumbai in 2011.

There were rules: No more than two days’ shooting time. One week of editing. An eight-minute time limit. Ten directors and one more to consider the 10 short films and create transitions. Theoretically, each short film is meant to capture a section of the city. The Paris edition didn’t make much use of this conceit and New York does even less. New York concentrates all its stories but one (a token trip to Brighton Beach for a sitcom-style romantic gripe between Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman) in Manhattan and even then manages to use a couple of the island’s over-filmed areas (Central Park and Chinatown) twice.

Since it is a collective account the rating is an average. However, there will be favourites and picks.