This Is Not A Film Review!
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist.
Does It Scintillate You, Yeah?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about those most sentimental of sensations, the ‘butterflies’, and am compelled to investigate the nearness of their extinction. I’ve started by having a look at my anatomy, in the interest of full evolutionary disclosure. The results aren’t pretty, so cynicism drives me towards the present environment of 21st Century sexuality, or of all-round horniness, if you prefer; so I’ll begin from there.
The primary threat to the butterflies is, in fact, all-round horniness. What’s the fancy intellectual-sounding term, collective, for a bunch of butterflies? Whatever that is – let’s imagine ourselves to be walking, talking, shagging highways, chemically bundled collections of traffic, and the butterflies to be paper-planes taking off from five-year old runways on the sidewalk. Hardly jaw-dropping stuff, by any measure. I almost forgot to specify that the butterflies are practically always experienced by males – unless there’s a memo I missed, and thus neglected to wipe my behind with – in order to make the point that males devote much of their time now to nurturing erections; and ladies, with all due respect, to giggling at the sheer abnormality of it all, before opting to be more ‘polite’. I fear I’ve strayed, somewhat, into the murkier waters of a science that’s not my own, but must carry on.
It’s amazing, some of the things ordinary people will willingly do to each other nowadays – the places we’ll gladly put our mouths, our feet, and our noses, from whence Spock and Captain Kirk would gladly turn away, for an interplanetary siesta on Martian Madagascar. Conventions of Generation Right Now theme these dark but not so far-off bodily lands in line with some of our favourite dishes, and yet people only bother to actually flavour one another less than half of the time. Perhaps mankind should keep its clothes on and eat more sandwiches; or maybe not hit the rest-room every time it feels a little queasy, thus flushing butterflies into existential obscurity – or sewerage tanks.
I’m not in the habit, personally, of eating already satisfactory snacks off of other people, but on the other hand, I do not understand the urge to call a doctor at the onset of butterflies: the mental sperlunk to nowhere, the inconstant heart-rate, the burning need to pull one’s pants down and detoxify like its New Year’s Eve. Butterflies are initially unpleasant, gradually over-demanding, and do not effectively run free-market economies, so it’s not surprising to find that a couple million years on, we’re about ready to do away with them altogether- be we mice or rabbits, meek or all-conquering, Michael Cera or Gerard Butler. That leaves us in a literal dead-heat: a world where romantic comedies are nothing more than deal-clinchers for a little rumpy, and movies about butterflies, no matter how good, offer futile, dying resistance.
Your first favourite scene in Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is going to be the one that introduces Kat Dennings, the film’s female lead, because it’s going to be perfectly legal to gawp at how hot she looks in a prep-school uniform – thereafter, you’re going to gawp at how hot she looks period. The music, the maybe-not-so-infinite-playlist, will work its charms on you the entire time, but not quite before it occurs to you...that young Michael Cera, Nick, will play Michael Cera for the rest of his acting career, and that it’s a damn good thing he’ll get away with it. You’re going to love that his character Nick drives a sh*tty car, has gay friends for a posse, whom he plays with in a band, which is alternately referred to as ‘Sh*t Sandwich’ and ‘Fistful of A-Holes’, amongst other unkind things. Did we mention that this is a movie about a girl, a guy and his band scouring New York City in search of her favourite band and what in rock circles is commonly referred to as ‘the new sound’? Marvellous, because that’s exactly what it is: baked beans on the tin, and baked beans on the in.
Infinite Playlist has the bubbliest script any rom-com has presented us with in ages. Not since Juno, a good two years ago now, have a rough ninety minutes of boy-meets-girl dialogue given us such a mind-job (that’s exactly what you think it is), and Peter Sollett, the gem’s director, makes sure the film has no pretensions about itself. Everybody involved is in this to provide a great yoghurt-in-pyjamas experience, provided an cinema will have you, and the simple purity of that is hard to put down. Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist feels a lot like Christmas – tingly inside, as if it were snowing all over your heart, or as if butterflies...
It couldn’t be, and it really isn’t. Like Christmas, however bright, however shiny, however well intentioned Infinite Playlist is, you can’t fully suppress the feeling that it’s all somebody somewhere’s marketing illusion. You sense there’s a glaze too tender over what’s supposed to be a night from hell, Norah’s life beyond the plot is much too perfect for her circumstances (Kat Dennings is far too perfect for her circumstances), and it’s heinous, absolutely heinous, that Michael Cera will sail along without ever having to break a sweat...but once you express yourself out loud, you’ll feel like a complete killjoy, and a lemony alkali will replace all your saliva. At least Cera is one of us, and you’d be a total ingrate, if you had anything negative to say about a whole plate of Kat Dennings.
The true disappointment, as epic as any you’ll ever suffer, is that you will feel nothing. While Sollett, Cera and Dennings dress trees in tinsel and deck the halls, plotting you an escape, you’ll dip a single toe in its fiction, wide awake to the notion that you’re witnessing a fairy-tale. You will fail to disengage from the realities beyond your seat, because butterflies are dead.
Our helmets, and our arms, are respectfully lowered.
POPCORN: This is not a review! – it’s a funeral; with Red Bull and ice-cream and air-guitar. A perfect little movie, unwittingly crafted for an imperfect world.
Our Five Favourite Scenes!
From Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist...
1- When Michael Cera, as Nick, tells his gay best friend forever that “it’s hard being hetero.” Amen.
2- When Kat Dennings’ blonde best friend forever, totally WASTED!!!, drops her gum in a coffee-coloured toilet bowl – then picks it up and chews it some more.
3- When Nick’s troublesome ex, packed full of vendetta, dances in front of his headlights by a pier, to that ‘I Believe In Miracles’ track from The Full Monty. If she’d been clumsier, the whole thing might have gone down in movie-history. We think.
4- When Norah’s indie-punk-ska ex, in a little leather, a pair of Converse, and hair-gel, tries to plug her his band’s album. The band’s called ‘Ozrael’, presumably ‘cause he’s Jewish, and the star of David looms on the CD’s cover. Classic.
5- When Nick’s entourage, Norah and all, walks into a transsexual strip-bar, where a trannie is butchering the words to 12 Days of Christmas. On the fifth day of Christmas, he – she? – wants five Taye Diggs; we want 50 Kat Dennings’s.
