"~" after title indicates home viewing
"/" before and after title indicates a repeat viewing
"sXX" in place of number indicates short films (fewer than 45 minutes long). Three cheers for YouTube.

122. (28 Jun) Paris je t'aime (Various, 2006) **

Worth seeing for a couple of the shorts, but far too scattershot and uneven to be more than hopelessly tedious overall. The shorts, and my highly fragmented thoughts on them:

Montmartre (Bruno Podalydès): ** [Zzzz.... Too whimsical by half, too boring by the other.]
Quais de Seine (Gurinder Chadha): ** [Aimless, overly-earnest bit on racial integration through romance. Well-intentioned, but totally flat.]
Le Marais (Gus Van Sant): **1/2 [A single joke film, but the joke's a pretty good one.]
Tuileries (Joel and Ethan Coen): ** [Twee and annoying. One of the few shorts with a distinctive visual style, and it's always funny to see Buscemi get beat up, but it comes off as more mean-spirited and oppressive than amusing. Basically, this short is everything that the Coens' critics often (falsely) accuse them of being.]
Loin de 16e (Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas): ***1/2 [One of the two best films in the set, a simple, moving study of the French underclass. Blue-tinted color scheme and graceful rhyming structure establish it as one of the few films with an identifiable directorial presence. Lovely.]
Porte de Choisy (Christopher Doyle): *1/2 [Torturous. Doyle could shoot an empty white room and make it gorgeous, but this is just a bunch of meaningless noise. Batshit crazy, and not at all in the good way.]
Bastille (Isabell Coixet): *1/2 [Imagine all of Amélie's precious quirks (third-person voice-over, heavily art-directed compositions, etc.) stuffed into four minutes, only with Jeunet's film's fairy-tale cuteness replaced by clichéd romantic homilies. Name-drops Béla Tarr and Haruki Murakami, but there's no reason for it; this film is about as far away from those artists' sensibilities as it's possible to get.]
Place des Victoires (Nobuhiro Suwa): **1/2 [Very pretty, and I could watch Willem Dafoe in anything, but it doesn't really work as a short; Suwa just doesn't have enough time to flesh out his story.]
Tour Eiffel (Sylvain Chomet): **1/2 [Credit for being one of the few directors to not take his assignment in a serious direction. It plays like a live-action version of The Triplets of Belleville, but I hate The Triplets of Belleville, and many of the aspects I find so unpleasant about that film are present here (mostly, I just find Chomet's drawings sickeningly ugly, and he has transferred them quite faithfully to live action here). Objectively one of the most successful shorts in the bunch; me and Chomet just don't get along.]
Parc Monceau (Alfonso Cuarón): **1/2 [I'm probably overrating this one, since I don't remember much about it even a day later. Mostly it's just a single, elegant tracking shot following a conversation between Ludivine Sagnier and Nick Nolte as her father. Touching, but very minor.]
Quartier des Enfants Rouges (Olivier Assayas): *** [Succeeds largely due to its visual style and editing rhythms, which make this film easily the most immediately pleasurable of the bunch. Maggie Gyllenhaal: Awesome, but you knew that already.]
Place des fêtes (Olivier Schmitz): **1/2 [Sweet, but like the Chadha short is simply too self-serious for its own good. Unlike the Chadha, though, this one works as a short.]
Pigalle (Richard LaGravenese): ** [Pointless. Bob Hoskins a welcome presence, but it's just a total waste of time.]
Quartier de la Madeleine (Vincenzo Natali): 1/2* [An utter fiasco. A stylized vampire story starring Elijah Wood, it starts out with an iris effect that had me hoping for a Guy Maddin-esque exercise (speaking of which, why the hell wasn't Maddin asked to participate?) but goes downhill immediately. Visually hideous, thematically retarded; just awful, awful, awful.]
Père-Lachaise (Wes Craven): *1/2 [What the fuck, Wes? Unbearably shrill and stupid, featuring Emily Mortimer as the single most unappealing woman in the history of women.]
Faubourg Saint-Denis (Tom Tykwer): *** [One of the few films that actually seems to have been designed as a short film rather than just a scene. Over-written and too clever (it is Tykwer, after all), it is nonethess remarkably well-directed and highly energetic (it is Tykwer, after all) and draws some nice comparisons between romance and the acting process. A lot of fun.]
Quartier Latin (Gérard Depardieu & Frédéric Auburtin): ** [Rowlands and Gazzarra welcome as always, but the film's a snooze. Poorly written, with zero visual style to speak of.]
14e arrondissement (Alexander Payne): ***1/2 [Sorry, haters, but this one isn't remotely condescending, although it certainly risks it. Narrated by a middle-American tourist with no French accent to speak of, it would be easy to accuse Payne of cheap ridicule, but he's got far more in mind. A study of a lonely midde-aged woman finding new life in Paris, Payne's film touchingly explores the inner struggle of the type of person person all but ignored by the large majority of cinema. A wonderful way for Paris je t'aime to conclude.]