Fridae

For his follow up to Valentine's Day, Gary Marshall crams a list of celebrities and actors that feels longer than the word count of this review into half a dozen stories all taking place in New York City on 31 December 2011, all of which have to be told and resolved within the two hour runtime of the film. And of course, somehow reiterate the spirit of the New Year holiday.

If you are familiar with how Gary Marshall and Katherine Fugate made Valentine's Day, you wouldn't be surprised at how New Year's Eve unfolds. There are too many sub-plots and too many characters, so characterisation is done in very broad strokes while the story-telling is straightforward to the point of being simple-minded. Without trying too hard, you too can reduce each sub-plot to a one-sentence character description, dilemma, and predict its Hallmark resolution within five minutes of its introduction. The horror is in not how the film will prove your prediction right, but how it feels as if its creators thought of its mini-stories in exactly this way too.

That said, New Year's Eve is a decent enough holiday film. It is after all, a Hollywood attempt at the Hong Kong tradition of the 贺岁片. Literally translated as a "New Year Blockbuster", this genre of films is marked by what everything we've observed in New Year's Eve. Marshall clearly has learnt his lesson well; his film may be fluffy but somehow in its explosion of eye-candy celebrities du jour and breezy if flimsy storytelling, it achieves the sort of agreeable, unchallenging, mildly entertaining quality that audiences stressed out from the holiday season seek. If this was what Gary Marshall set out to do, he has clearly achieved what he wanted – so much so that New Year's Eve makes It's a Wonderful Life feel overly cerebral and inappropriately depressing for a holiday-themed movie.

If Robert Altman were still alive, he'd be my dark horse candidate to make New Year's Eve, as a sort of holiday-themed, New York City version of Short Cuts. Cross-cutting in his inimitable style between the same number of intertwining storylines involving the same large cast, Altman would have weaved a rich and intricate tapestry that would be a follow-up to A Prairie Home Companion. And you can bet he'd work in a sub-plot involving the Occupy Movement as well.

Of course, Gary Marshall is no Robert  Altman and New Year's Eve is no Short Cuts. Still, Gary Marshall has made yet another entertaining film to watch as an escape from the stress of the holiday season.