Nick and Norahs Infinite Playlist the Guardian Review
Film Review | 'Nick & Norah'southward Infinite Playlist'
For Muddled Youth, Music to Live Past
- Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
- Directed by Peter Sollett
- One-act, Drama, Music, Romance
- PG-13
- 1h 30m
As thin every bit an iPod Nano, every bit full of adolescent cocky-display every bit a Facebook folio, "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist" strives to capture, in meticulous item, what it'southward similar to exist young right at present. Working from a pop novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan (and an idiomatically spot-on screenplay by Lorene Scafaria) the director, Peter Sollett, spins a shy, sweet romance effectually a carefully called soundtrack with music (and cameo appearances) past such emblems of up-to-the-infinitesimal hipster credibility as the vocalist-songwriter Devendra Banhart and the ring Bishop Allen, among others.
Nick and Norah, New Jersey high school students bouncing through the stone clubs of New York, are drawn together past their shared musical passions (in particular for an enigmatic band called Where's Fluffy). The tunes that play alongside their nocturnal hazard express longing, sadness, anxiety and joy with more than intensity than they can muster themselves. Nick, played by the wet-noodle heartthrob Michael Cera ("Juno," "Superbad") and Norah (Kat Dennings, who has a hint of Kate Winslet's soft, smart loveliness in her face) are, like and so many kids these days, most comfortable with diffidence, understatement and a deadpan mode of accost that collapses the distinction between irony and sincerity.
Norah's wary, pouty manner and Nick's odd mix of timidity and sarcasm are both strategies of self-protection. He has recently been dumped by Tris (Alex Dziena), a schoolmate of Norah's and ane of her social oppressors. She has a erstwhile young man (Jay Baruchel) and, behind her mask of indifference, a lot of self-incertitude. The girl of a recording industry large shot, Norah is never sure if anyone likes her for herself. Nick, for his part, seems unsure about whether he likes himself at all.
But Nick and Norah are absurd, and besides overnice. Which is cool for "Nick & Norah's Space Playlist," and nice for them, simply also somewhat limiting. Mr. Sollett shows an admirably low-central directorial temperament, resisting the temptations of melodrama and farce that hover around any teenage romantic comedy. Like "Raising Victor Vargas," his before feature (also about lovestruck immature people in Lower Manhattan, but set in a demographic universe far removed from Nick and Norah's zone of suburban entitlement), "Infinite Playlist" regards its characters with affectionate detachment, and assures its audience that no great calamities or revelations are in shop. Instead, there are a series of modest crises and tiny epiphanies, all calculation up to a story that courts triviality in its pursuit of charm.
The charm is there, non least in the picture show'due south vision of New York as a happy playground for underage night owls. The metropolis's streets are then beneficial that Nick's abandonment of a daughter (not Norah) in a desolate spot on the West Side tin seem like a forgivable failure of gallantry, rather than an human action of passive-aggressive, potentially homicidal malice. Everyone has a cellphone, afterward all, and the criminals and crazies that used to haunt these neighborhoods are little more than flickering memories from older movies.
Image
Partly because of its construction — it takes place in the course of a unmarried night during which time races, dawdles, pauses and skips — "Nick & Norah'south Infinite Playlist" may remind you of some older movies. It's similar Martin Scorsese'southward "Afterwards Hours" filtered through the high school sensibility of John Hughes, or Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise" remade for Nickelodeon.
All of which I mean, mostly, as praise. Unlike run-of-the-manufacturing plant teensploitation comedies that smirk at or deign to the young, this film is smart about its audience, and respectful of information technology as well. The linguistic communication and sexual practice are kept inside PG-13 boundaries, but the script, similar the volume, is calmly candid virtually what adolescents do and say, sexually and otherwise, in the historic period of Too Much Information and Friends With Benefits. Neither prurient nor moralistic, "Nick & Norah'due south Space Playlist" surveys the varieties of teenage experience with tolerant sympathy, which is for the most part how the characters — gay and straight, reckless and cautious, drunkard and sober — regard i some other.
Indeed, the movie is so friendly that you may wish for a little more conflict: higher emotional stakes, riskier jokes, a touch of danger in the night air. Simply maybe those are historic period-inappropriate preoccupations. Just about everyone in "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist" seems to be having a good fourth dimension, and virtually of them seem like adept kids (though Norah's friend Caroline, played by a scene-stealing Ari Graynor, is probably headed for a stint in rehab). Why begrudge them their fun, or wish premature heartache upon them? At that place volition be plenty of fourth dimension for the blues later on, which is all the more reason to savor the fleeting, teasing pop pleasures this movie celebrates and dispenses.
"Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Information technology has profanity, sexual references and situations, and underage drinking.
NICK & NORAH'S Space PLAYLIST
Opens on Fri nationwide.
Directed by Peter Sollett; written past Lorene Scafaria, based on the novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan; director of photography, Tom Richmond; edited by Myron Kerstein; music past Mark Mothersbaugh; production designer, David Doernberg ; produced by Kerry Kohansky, Chris Weitz, Paul Weitz and Andrew Miano; released by Columbia Pictures. Running fourth dimension: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: Michael Cera (Nick), Kat Dennings (Norah), Alexis Dziena (Tris), Ari Graynor (Caroline), Aaron Yoo (Thom) and Jay Baruchel (Tal).
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/movies/03play.html
0 Response to "Nick and Norahs Infinite Playlist the Guardian Review"
Post a Comment