Paris Je T'Aime

Paris Je T'Aime (2006)
24 Directors
25 Writers
73 Actors

Synopsis
24 tiny little bits of beginnings....for 2 fucking hours


MOster
Five minutes doesn't really leave a lot for a viewer, director, writer to do; and the challenge there is what probably made it interesting for them.  There are varying levels of success in the telling of these stories. The more successful shorts were those which explored first meetings rather than those which attempted to encapsulate long histories in expository dialog and follow that recap with a quick bit of status qua.


What I found most interesting here was not the variation between the directors from piece to piece, but the variation between typical work by these directors and what they put forth in their shorts.  Cuaron, Craven, and the Cohens (ah, accidental alliteration...) each provided us with pieces that are far outside their normal styles and I like seeing that such divergence is possible.

One of the many things we learn from this film is that some directors (and/or writers) just don't do well with austerity in storytelling.  While they definitely had budget to play with, I appreciate how difficult it must have been to keep the production value so high. In fact, I wonder if some of the LA-based players were selected due to their presence in Europe for some other venture.

In spending so much time allocating their nickles, I think the producers didn't make enough choices in the editing room.  I don't know much about the process--and I don't care to do any research--but I wonder if there was an agreed script approval framework prior to filming; and I wish they would have been allowed to (and had cared to) pay some people but not include their material. The film would benefit greatly from removal of four or five of these segments.

The Woman
if you couldn't tell by the synopsis i disliked this. a lot. some of these were amusing, but then i was just annoyed that the story didn't continue. i called them commercials. it was a whole 2 hours of love commercials that took place in paris. i stopped paying attention by approximately the 3rd commercial so that would put the ticker at minute 6. i feel ripped off. i don't want to watch a movie of 24 full length movie pitches. it aggravates me. it also, because of it's total length juxtaposed (art points for me using the artist statement golden word) to the two minute, sometimes less, segments made it seem like it was a 6 hour movie. and i use the term "movie" loosely. i was complaining so much that moster actually turned it off and said he would watch it while i wasn't around, but that is practically never so i turned it back on so we could check it of the list and move the fuck on.