Happy New York…Wait, Sorry! Happy New Year!
A Love, Actually Spin Off That is Less Heart-Warming and More Problematic.
Tags: #NewYearsEve #HolidayMovie #Whatthe2010s #ZacEfronandMichellePfeiffer #LoveActually #NewYork #TheseStreetsWillMakeYouFeelBrandNew #BigLightsWillInspireYou #HallmarkBrainWashing #WasThereAPlotHere
By now, most – if not all – of the Western world has seen and been inundated with memes about Love, Actually, the 2003 British festive romcom. The movie follows a few inter-connected groups of people and purports to explore several forms of love between couples at Christmas. Whether or not it achieved this is not the focus of this article. Instead, the format was so successful in the box office that Garry Marshall copied it and went on a holiday themed movie making spree that gifted us with 2011’s New Year’s Eve.
Relationship Map: New Year’s Eve (2011, directed by Garry Marshall)
Following the middling success of Valentine’s Day (2010) Garry Marshall and Kathrine Fugate were undeterred and tricked a whole new all-star cast onto the set of New Year’s Eve. In the movie, we follow eight-ish different storylines that overlap as an afterthought and work better as a long form commercial for tourism to New York City than anything else. With almost the same run time and number of plotlines, you’d think New Year’s Eve would be a decent spiritual sequel to Love, Actually. Somehow, though, it manages to lack plot development and any character charms that made Love, Actually so memorable.
Let’s take a look at our New Year’s couples and see what, if anything, happens on this romp through the Big Apple:
Pfeifron – The Resolution List:
Zac Efron and Michelle Pfeiffer do a lot of the heavy lifting for this movie. This is the only plotline that has anything interesting or reasonable going on at all. Zac Efron is a carefree bike messenger dreaming of his big night out on the town. Michelle Pfeiffer is a wallflower of a music executive assistant worried that she hasn’t completed a single resolution from last year. After a brief encounter in the office, Pfeiffer hires Efron to make all her resolutions (breakfast at Tiffany’s, a trip to Bali, walking all five boroughs in one day, etc.) come true. The two hop on the back of a motorbike and spend the day realizing that Efron might not be as heartless as his character was written while Pfeiffer might be an A-list celeb in baggy clothing. Alright, they don’t really change that much, but they do reach a sort of understanding that maybe different people can be different and that is ok, too. And they kiss at midnight, which everyone but Zaccy-boy seems a bit uncomfortable with.
Overall Development: Two people that aren’t similar become friends, 6/10
Who Are You Meeting – The Twist That Wasn’t That Surprising Because No One Really Cared:
Throughout the movie, several people have a mysterious meeting at midnight. One that everyone knows about and will reference, but in the most obscure way to make it unclear who is meeting whom and where and why (the when is midnight - it’s New Year’s Eve). This is to keep us, the audience, from guessing who the woman Josh Duhamel might be meeting. However, the only two women possible are Sarah Jessica Parker and Hilary Swank. As Hilary Swank and her team often mention this mysterious meeting she has, it can’t be her, obviously. So, we’re left with Sarah Jessica Parker who has spent most of the movie tracking down her wayward daughter to prevent her from hanging out with her friends in Times Square (which we will get into later). Most of this storyline is therefore left to Duhamel, whose character is stuck outside of the city for a rush wedding where he’s the only guest. Once he gets back to New York, he goes directly to the big party his mother’s music label is throwing, gives what is played as a meaningful speech, but is actually quite forgettable, and then his mother tells him he’s grown. So instead of sleeping with the women that are hitting on him, he leaves and runs to a closed bar(?) where he sits for an unknown amount of time waiting for SJP to show up. Then they kiss at 2am and it’s unclear if he knows about SJP’s daughter at all.
Overall Development: Rich dude and a mom follow through on year old plans to hook up again, 2/10
Times Square – The Dream Team of Slowly Raising and Lowering Glowing Balls in NYC:
Hilary Swank is the VP of the Times Square Alliance and is in charge of the ball drop. She’s afraid of heights and is part of the mysterious midnight meeting club. She loves New Year’s Eve and is better at making speeches than Josh Duhamel. Most of the drama in this part of the movie revolves around the big light-up ball not lighting up. This is apparently something no one on the team can fix (aka was the IT team of any company ever hired to do this job?). But don’t you fret, because ‘the eagle has landed’; Hector Elizondo, the most amazing electrician NYC, nay, the world has ever seen, is ready to save the day despite probably being unlawfully fired at some point before the movie commences. He spends the next few hours checking each light bulb individually on top of a skyscraper and then instead of getting a raise and his job back, Swank puts him in charge for the last 30 minutes of the night so she can run around the city for the *MYSTERIOUS MEETING*. Ludacris, a police officer, is also there the whole time, to emotionally support Swank, because their platonic relationship is more important than him having the night off to spend time with his family, who eventually just show up at his job, because Swank cares too. Why wasn’t that the plan to begin with? We don’t know either. If you got an answer, drop ‘em in the comments.
Overall Development: A ball gets light-up thanks to Joe from The Princess Diaries, 4/10
Grumpy Old Man – The Story That Was Supposed to Be Sad But There Wasn’t Enough Attachment To Actually Make You Cry:
And now the answer you’ve been waiting for *drum roll, please* Hilary Swank was off to meet her Father, Robert De Niro! He’s in the hospital, alone, because he has made poor choices in life, but Swank was never one of them. Which he tells to his nurse in a hallucination brought on by his advanced cancer that he has refused all treatment for in penance, we think. It’s unclear, but he is very sick and very alone…with Halle Berry, his nurse who for some reason has a shift at the hospital that ends just before midnight. De Niro and Swank reunite just before midnight to go up on the roof of the hospital and watch the ball drop in Times Square (we are not entirely sure how they gained access to this restricted area but our guess is that she probably has a key to everything as the VP for the Times Square Alliance). Finally, they are a family again. Just in time for De Niro’s character to kick the bucket, leaving Swank with a baggy of personal belongings and nothing else to do. Except, nurse Alyssa Milano sweeps in to show her all the newborn babies. Meanwhile, nurse Berry has logged into a zoom call on a work computer in a dark and empty room to chat with her husband who is in the military and they have a nice conversation for all of 3 minutes before it’s cut off. This whole part of the movie is underdeveloped to a point suggesting that scenes were cut for…time, or the writers didn’t really know what to do with it but really wanted to get some additions on the casting list? (Berry dropped out of the role Katherine Heigl took on, but came back after some personal events were resolved to get the top credit role of Nurse to De Niro).
Overall Development: Sick man admits to being a bad father, nurse shifts in NYC are weird, 2.5/10
Baby Off – The 25K Cash Grab For Squeezing A Baby Out At 12:00am And Not 11:59:
Almost entirely on their own (they may or may not be in the same hospital as De Niro & Berry) Jessica Biel and Seth Meyers and Til Schweiger and Sarah Paulson are both expecting couples in NYC living their lives. The hospital is running a contest (is it a contest?) where the first couple to have a baby in the hospital in the new year will receive 25,000 dollars. Meyers and Schweiger immediately understood the assignment and begin trying to induce labor. Beil is on board, but Paulson is blissfully just being pregnant. Both eventually rush into labor just before midnight and despite the Beil-Meyers baby technically being born before the Schweiger-Paulson baby, Meyers realized that Schweiger, as a father of three girls, really needs the money more than he does and fudges the times on the birth certificate. We’d give this plotline a higher ranking, but the total screen time is less than 5 minutes and mostly focused on Beil and Meyers making quippy lines at each other. We’d rather see Schweiger and Paulson. Click here to sign the petition for a full length Schweiger-Paulson movie.
Overall Development: Two babies are born and a first-time dad forfeits his price to the three-times dad, 5/10
Bon Jovi Is Hot In This One Apparently - The Weirdest Relationship Mistake That Took A Year To Talk About:
So imagine you are Katherine Heigl and you have your own catering business that Sofia Vergara and Russell Peters help you run. And you get a big job catering a music label’s fancy NYE party and you take it, only to find out that your ex-fiance is playing the Times Square show and convinced the label to hire you so that he could say sorry for proposing and then immediately going no-contact for a year because he was scared to face his feelings but he has realized that he DOES love you and wants to get back together. What a classic example of creepy guy behavior that gets romanticized. But after two good smacks and some light knife threats, you decide that it’s all good that he left you alone in your apartment and apparently can’t work a phone and you WILL forgive him, because it’s New Year’s Eve after all, the time to forgive and forget (with the help of copious amounts of alcohol). That’s it. There are some extended sequences where Bon Jovi is singing and kind of seems more like a music video than movie, but they really don’t talk very much before kissing at the party. Which means Bon Jovi is not singing at Times Square like his contract said he was supposed to, and no one cares, because his backup singer is there and we’ll get into that later. This plotline could have been its own Hallmark movie but we guess it didn’t sell.
Overall Development: Creepy famous guy gives a half-hearted apology and girl accepts it, 1/10
Elevator Stockholm - The Guy Who Hates New Year’s And The Most Hated Girl From Glee
Zac Efron has a roommate who hates New Year’s Eve. Ashton Kutcher supposedly had his heart broken on NYE and has never forgotten the pain. Lea Michele just moved into 5B in the same old, poorly maintained apartment. They get stuck in an elevator, Michele loves NYE or maybe just her job or something and Kutcher comes to love Michele so I guess he’s over his aversion to NYE because he follows her to Times Square in his pajamas just to watch her sing. Getting stuck in an elevator with someone for 5 hours is the new Tinder/Hinge/Bumble. Oh! And Michele gets to sing a very Americanized version of Auld Lang Syne, which we are not a fan of.
Overall Development: Having the hots for someone at first sight because they’re stuck in an elevator together, 0/10
Fifteen Going On Times Square – The Kids Just Want To Have Their First Kiss Surrounded By 50,000 Strangers:
And rounding out the cast list, Abigail Breslin is Sarah Jessica Parker’s daughter and has wanted nothing more than to kiss Jake T. Austin at the stroke of midnight in Times Square. They spend all day talking to their friends at school and various places around the city and build up this moment into A Big Thing. But SJP wants to cuddle and watch the ball drop on TV and won’t let Breslin go make out with Austin. So what’s a teen to do but sneak out and force her mother to hunt through the crowds of NYC for her. Austin kisses some other girl, which really just helps SJP and Breslin make up and be all mother-daughter, but also then they go off to do different things at 2am because midnight at Times Square is one thing, but a party at 2am is totally cool with SJP. Which is understandable when you are a part of the *Mysterious Meeting* at Midnight club and you’ve missed midnight, but you figure I’ll hop in a horse-drawn carriage to go see if a dude is waiting for me. And Breslin and Austin make up too, so they kiss, and everyone is happy and feeling the spirit of NYE in NYC. We don’t spend enough time with these characters to care much about their teenage drama.
Overall Development: Guy kisses another girl but it’s somehow okay, 1/10
What Was the Plan Here 2.0 – The Missing Plotlines and Underdeveloped Characters:
We’ve certainly been critical of other stories that felt underdeveloped in past blogs (see, for example, The Quarry), but with this one it felt even more difficult to develop any kind of attachment to any of the characters. The plots fell flat, the characters were boring, the dialogue was riddled with one-liners, and the overall development was non-existent.
We skipped between the various characters too quickly to care much about any of them. While the format felt very much like Love, Actually, there was certainly something missing in the execution. Despite the problems that the 21st century has pointed out in Love, Actually, there are characters that go through changes and not every plotline is incomplete. And we wouldn’t put it in so many words with New Year’s Eve, but if you can find a YouTube video of just the Pfeifron parts, watch that instead of the full feature film.
In case you were wondering, we DID run this movie through the Holiday and Movie Bingo boards from last year. It did not pass either test. Most of the failure came from Kutcher and Michele and Bon Jovi and Heigl’s stories. Check out our boards below:
