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Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and photographer, is one of the most outspoken critics of the Communist government. He is internationally known for his witty and almost taunting art which challenge not only the methods and ideologies of the Chinese government but also our ideologies. Principles we hold so dear, he brushes aside as useless or foolish.

One of my favorite pieces of his is the series of pictures (“tripartite photograph” for all the photography buffs out there) he took of himself breaking a Han dynasty urn (approximately 2000 years old) in 1995. This piece is (aptly) named “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn”.

This was the first Ai Weiwei piece I saw, featured in an article when he was first arrested, back when I didn’t even know who he was. When I first saw it, I winced. Who did this man think he was, dropping such a precious urn, which holds so much history and heritage, as if it was nothing? But, as I later learned, that’s the point. He was bashing our obsession with idols and images, our idea that by worshipping an image or an object, we worship what it stands for – culture and civilization. This image has become, ironically, an icon of iconoclasm.

But perhaps, it goes deeper than that. Maybe he was bashing the Chinese government, demonstrating how carelessly it destroyed temples and historical artifacts to more effectively deliver its narrative of China’s past and future. Or maybe he was making a statement, showing how old culture must be destroyed in order to make way for the new. Here’s part of the caption of this picture on its online auction page:

While the triptych gained notoriety as an iconoclastic gesture, it encapsulates several broader constants in Ai’s work: the socio-political commentary on the random nature of vectors of power; questions of authenticity and value (vis-à-vis the artist’s comment that the value of “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” has today exceeded that of the once-prized urn itself), and the cycle of creative destruction necessary for any culture’s survival and evolution.

Damn.

So, I support Ai Weiwei not only because he epitomizes free speech at its best and not only because he is a much needed activist in China but because he is a provocateur – something very few people are bold enough to be and something many more people should be.

Wo ai ni, Ai Weiwei.

“New York, I love You” is a collection of eleven short films created in 2009, about love stories in New York City. Each short film is directed by a different director who places their own perspective about love in the form of lust, companionship, loss, deceit, and playfulness.

At face value, the theory of this film is no better than the 2010 film “Valentine’s Day” or the 2011 film “New Years Eve,” both of which rest of the laurels of their celebrity-packed casts and cheesily connected plot lines. These films lack true ingenuity exhibit exactly what I would expect from a cash cow blockbuster film – recognizable faces, an addictive love plot, and shallow character development. “New York, I Love You” follows this same path by casting the popular faces of Orlando Bloom, Rachel Bilson, Natalie Portman and Bradley Cooper. Yes, the first film with Bilson is awkward and amateur in both acting and writing to a painful extent. However, if you can move past this scene, the creativity, wit, character development, and ambiguity create a viewing experience that is both refreshing and engaging without losing integrity.

What “New York, I Love You” does is create room for dialogue post film, when you wonder more about the characters, their motivations, what was believable and what wasn’t. This kind of conversation is lacking in most blockbuster films with similar casts to these. They leave room for conversation with only regard the quality of graphics, suspense, gore, or crude humor. This is not to say that there isn’t a time and place for each of these in the predictability of most movies, but like a good book, it’s the post experience curiosity that truly makes a work so engaging. Dialogue enables analysis and the ability to truly appreciate a work for the intricacies and thought the writer places into the story line and the characters that live in them.

In the short directed by Shekhar Kapur, Shia LaBeouf plays a severely crippled hotel bellhop that has an ambiguously intimate emotional relationship with Julie Christie. He could perhaps be a simple memory of her once lover, a manifestation of her imagination, or perhaps he is in the present and he is haunted by an obsession with an older woman. In another film directed by Mira Nair, starring Natalie Portland, Nair touches on the arab-jewish relationship, the taboo that exists between these cultures and the ultimate draw of love and curiosity that can also bring them together. These simple unsure yet addictingly fun analyses are what make this movie experience worth watching, as well as the intricacy of the tie between narratives.

The film provides a refreshing audience perspective and thought requirement that is usually not asked of the viewer to participate in. It’s a love affair between us, “New York, I Love You.”

\”New York, I Love You\” Trailer