New Year’s Eve

  • Title: New Year’s Eve
  • IMDB: link

new-years-eve-blu-rayNew Year’s Eve follows the lives of an ensemble of New Yorkers, somehow each of whom find themselves in a series of cliched, sickeningly sweet entanglements or awkward situations that only bad screenwriters can dream up, in the hours leading up to Times Square’s biggest night.

The cast includes a single man (Tad Hamilton) with car trouble dreaming of the woman he met last New Year’s Eve,  a single mother (Sarah Jessica Parker) whose teenage daughter (Abigail Breslin) wants to spend New Year’s Eve with a cute boy (Jake T. Austin) in Times Square, Robert De Niro as a man dying of cancer wanting to see the ball drop one last time and his doctor (Cary Elwes) and nurse (Halle Berry) who try to make his final hours comfortable, and a pair of couples (Seth Meyers, Jessica Biel and Til SchweigerSarah Paulson) jockeying to be the parents of the first born baby of the year.

Several of the stories revolve around the production of the night’s activities including Hilary Swank and Ludacris working on the final preparations for the show,  a caterer (Katherine Heigl) who finds herself working with her ex-boyfriend (Jon Bon Jovi) who wants one more chance, the New Year’s hating Randy (Ashton Kutcher) who ends up getting stuck in an elevator with a back-up singer (Glee‘s Lea Michele) and his best friend Paul (Zac Efron) who is offered tickets to the party in the city by a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) who quits her job and needs his help to try to complete a series of bizarre New Year’s resolutions before midnight, and Hector Elizondo as an electrician rehired to save the show at the last minute.

What talent the movie assembles it wastes in an overly-sentimental cinematic disaster without managing even the smallest big of charm (the only bright spot being Lea Michele’s performance of “Auld Lang Syne”). Widely regarded by critics as one of the worst movies of last year, New Years Eve certainly earns that title in every single frame. The Blu-ray and DVD both include a gag reel and commentary from director Gerry Marshall. The Blu-ray/DVD two-disc set also includes an Ultraviolet digital copy of the film.

[Warner Bros., Blu-ray $35.99, DVD $28.98]