October 03 2008 / (1)

Michael Cera is the new John Cusak.

Thanks to our good friend Steve, I caught a preview of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist this week, along with Cinnamon and a few friends from the office. It's a cute flick, with a great soundtrack and plenty of laughs and memorable lines. We talked about it quite a bit the next day. Most of us enjoyed it, but none of us was entirely happy with it.

The main characters are all high school seniors, over the bridge from New Jersey and having a crazy night in New York City. Michael Cera plays Nick, who's your basic Michael Cera type -- shy, mumbly but dry-witted. Although Scott would be happy to see "The Michael Cera in Awkward Situations Show," I'm starting to get bored with it. He's charming and nice, but it's the same schtick you've seen before. Here, he's the bassist in a queer-core band (he's straight, but his bandmates are not), and he's recently been broken up with by his girlfriend of six months, Triss. Nick's band is playing a show in NYC that night, and his favorite underground band, Where's Fluffy?, is playing a secret show somewhere in the city, too.

Kat Dennings is Norah, who's the daughter of somebody important -- which apparently means she can get into any club in New York, but it comes with its own baggage, too. I really enjoyed her character, whose sarcastic attitude is a defense she puts up to mask her insecurities. I knew plenty of girls like her when I was that age, and was infatuated with more than one of them. She's "frienemies" with Triss, and has been picking up and loving discarded post-breakup mix CDs that Nick has been sending her.

Norah and her best friend, Caroline, catch Nick's show, where Caroline gets raging drunk and Norah runs into Triss and her new boy. Triss picks on her for not having a date. Norah asks Nick (whom she doesn't know) to "be her boyfriend for five minutes," driving Triss into a fit of jealousy and unwittingly setting off the film's chain of events. Nick offers to drive Caroline and Norah home, but Nick's bandmates decide to take matters into their own hands to encourage the spark they see between the two and relieve them of Caroline. And then lose her in the city, setting in motion the sub-plot. The hunt for Caroline and the hunt for Where's Fluffy? take the cast all over the city, with crazy antics and random "SNL" cast-members and other cameos popping up throughout. You can probably predict how the movie ends, based on the title, but getting there is still fun.

Scott decided afterward that Infinite Playlist was basically Garden State a few years younger. He felt it was one big advertisement for music, though not nearly as pushy as the other film, which practically had built-in commercials for The Shins and other bands. I felt it was more like an updated version of your standard John Hughes movie: high school awkwardness and sincerity mixed with plenty of screwball comedy and a great soundtrack. If this movie came out when I was in high school, I'd have loved every minute of it.

However, the biggest problem I had with the movie was precisely the fact that the main characters are all in high school. Maybe when I was 18 I wouldn't have thought about it, but in the back of my 33-year-old mind I wondered how all these things were happening to supposed high schoolers. Specifically:

I know, I sound lame and old, but considering how much ground is covered and how many bars and clubs the various characters go to, there's quite a lot of disbelief to suspend. Not once was a fake ID shown, nor was a parent ever talked to or heard from. And these issues would never have crossed my mind had everyone been in college instead of high school. The very few plot points that related to high school (basically a single scene and a bit of flirtation about where Nick and Norah were going to college) could have easily been changed without harming the story in any way.

I never had a "baby Superman" moment, but that question of how all these teenagers were gaining access to all this incredible nightlife was in the back of my mind, bugging me.

I can only assume that the age was set in order to appeal to a high school demographic. Or perhaps it was just held onto from the book the film was based on. But I don't know of a single high schooler who wouldn't watch college kids -- most of them hope to be one someday, after all.

1 Comments / Leave a comment

October 05 2008, 11:23 PM / Kristin

It's uncanny how similar our reactions were to this movie. I saw it Friday night and thought pretty much the same thing - I like Cera's schtick, but it's getting a bit old. How was this character any different from Juno or Superbad? Re: the high school angle - huge suspension of disbelief. Still, it was entertaining and not a waste of 2 hours and a matinee price.





    

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