Dennie Gordon’s New York Minute is a feature-length Stuff magazine cover starring the barely legal Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen as sparring twin sisters, Roxy and Jane Ryan, set loose on a lowbrow, farcical journey through New York City (often doubled, unconvincingly, by Toronto). The young ladies find themselves caught up in a festering carcass of a plot better left to the vultures who’ll blindly patronize this monstrosity.
Instead, let’s focus on the film’s reductive mindset, which posits a world where two privileged white girls are hunted by software-pirating Asians, criticized by convenience store-running Arabs, primped and pampered by sassy black hairdressers, and ogled by a near-pedophilic truant officer (Eugene Levy), all in the aid of achieving their scholarly and monetary American dreams. It plays like a faux Dr. Seuss poem featuring the Hilton sisters and composed in secret by illegal substance-fueled dirty minds. Call it Every Race Has Their Place.
It’s depressing that New York Minute is being pitched toward impressionable youth, though not at all surprising when one considers the isolationist and abstinence-driven culture from which it spawned. Revelatory of our collective ignorance and fear of “otherness,” the film is as dishonest about sex as it is about race. Recalling the old Buster Keaton gag where a hand covers the camera lens as a woman steps out of the bathtub (minus Keaton’s profound satirical import), New York Minute continually places the Olsens in skimpy outfits and easily removed towels, always framing their their holiest of holies off screen in a cruel tsk-tsk fashion that reeks of misguided puritanism. The film is an evasion of complex truth through the teasing of objectified lies, all in the name of an ill-advised, peculiarly American morality.
Image/Sound
Dr. Drew looks great for his age, but if there’s something this New York Minute DVD gets wrong, it’s the doc’s face. Colors are vibrant, blacks are solid, and edge enhancement is nil, but skin tones are somewhat off. Maybe it’s because Ashley and Mary-Kate’s faces need to be kept as pink and perky as possible, but it seems that everyone else’s face takes a fall as a result. Just as flat as the doctor’s face is the film’s dialogue. I had to pump up the volume to listen to some sequences, especially the first kitchen sequence. That said, the rest of the Dolby Digital track is constantly a-buzzing, from the ticking clocks to the annoying emo punk music, and the active surrounds make up for the so-so dialogue recording.
Extras
I don’t buy the bloopers included on this New York Minute DVD because Ashley and Mary-Kate seem disingenuous when they laugh. (To Ashley’s credit, though, she plants a kiss on Mary-Kate’s feet that’s rather endearing.) And for anyone who couldn’t get enough of the film’s existing ending, two alternate endings are included here. Rounding out the disc is the superfluous, misleadingly titled “In a New York Minute” making-of featurette, a behind-the-scenes slide show set to Simple Plan’s obnoxious “Vacation” song, a plug for the film’s novelizations, and trailers for New York Minute, The Polar Express, A Cinderella Story, and Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.
Overall
For foot fetishists, the highlight of this New York Minute DVD is the bloopers section that shows Ashley going for Marky-Kate’s foot with her mouth.
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