New Year's Eve

New Year's Eve is a movie that follows the lives of several different people as they prepare for the big night. Ashton Kutcher plays Randy, a young man who has become disillusioned on the holiday after his girlfriend dumped him. He has an unexpected encounter with a bubbly young woman named Elise, who has thrown herself into the spirit of the holiday by decorating the halls of their apartment complex. The two end up stuck in an elevator where they begin exchanging their thoughts and opinions. A different story involves Hilary Swank as head of the Time's Square committee to have the ball drop. Through a turn of events, the ball becomes stuck with only minutes to go, and a dismissed employee is called in to get it running again. One of the more heart wrenching stories in this movie involves Robert De Niro as the dying hospitalized father of Hilary Swank's character Clair. Through a mad dash of events, they end up being able to watch the ball in Times Square drop together. Other stories in the movie include a mother, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, trying to prevent her teenage daughter from going out to the Times Square gathering unsupervised. The daughter manages to sneak away and eventually makes her way to where she is supposed to meet her boyfriend only to be faced with a disappointing surprise. One of the more unexpected stories is woven throughout the movie which has a young man played by Zac Efron, helping a more mature woman participate in all the activities she has always wanted to experience. The woman, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, is amazed at how the young man can come up with interesting ways to meet the activities on her list. All of the stories have characters who overlap in each others lives, which shows how all people are connected on levels they are never aware of.