Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)

Story: Nick (Michael Cera) is taking his breakup with Tris (Alexis Dziena) badly, but he agrees to play that night anyway. Norah (Kat Dennings)'s first stop on her quest to find Where's Fluffy, a mythic band that almost never plays, just happens to be Nick's band's show. When his bandmates (Aaron Yoo and Rafi Gavron) spy a romantic opportunity, they agree to take Norah's drunk best friend (Ari Graynor) home in order to force Nick and Norah together.

Accidental hiatus over!

While this movie a minor entry in the Into the Night/One Crazy Night canon, it's not without it's delights. I haven't hit Cera backlash yet (hopefully I never will), although I think I might be getting to the point of being over him. As lovely, funny, and sweet as that kid is, I'm sort of in love with Dennings now, and he's just going to deal with it. Although I did cheer in my head when I saw he got above the title billing. Good for him!

Mostly I am in love with how she has curves and hopes she keeps them and would really like her to tell me what lipstick she is wearing in this movie, but I also love how she's hit this sweet spot where she's an authentic teenager in her actions and speech. Even the running bit of Norah explaining her jokes that weren't funny in the first place, while it fell flat, was believable.

Otherwise, the supporting cast keeps the movie humming along even when the scenes between the leads drag, and there are a lot of unexpected cameos that pop up to distract the audience.

Unfortunately, Lorene Scafaria's screenplay, based on Rachel Cohn and David Levithan's novel, falls prey to a lot of rom-com trappings, notably demonizing the other romantic interests of main characters so that there's never any doubt about who we rooting for. I liked Dziena in Broken Flowers, and I think I've made my feelings about Jay Baruchel quite clear in recent weeks (love!), and they are playing these complete dirtbags. It's a nice stretch for Baruchel and takes wonderful advantage of the nasal quality of his voice (although it also made me wonder is being a Chipster is not the sole providence of WASPs, as previously thought), but a better movie would either exclude these characters so that we never really get a sense of them or make them people would could like, just not with Nick and Norah.

Ah, well. B-