Oct 3, 2008 12:19 PM
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Hollywood, 11:19 AM
Wed Feb 10
58 posts in the last 24 hours
So that movie Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist is out today, and look! It's getting very good and pretty good reviews! Well that's good for little Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, the fawn-faced stars of the emo-queercore-fake New York City romp film about two Stars-crossed lovers who enjoy a wild night on the LES in pursuit of good music, good lovin', and a drunk girl. Yeah. It's nice. I haven't seen it yet, but I already fucking hate it.
Why do I hate it? How could I possibly hate a movie that features the lovable sameness of another Cera performance, a hip and faggy supporting cast (there's a dude from Spring Awakening in it!), and a whole senior year road trip to Six Flags' worth of jangly and twee pop rock thinkin' muziks? Well, actually, I hate it for those reasons and I hate it because it's all a big lie. And, also, I'm maybe getting older and no longer feel represented by movies about "young folks." It's like that movie Juno (also starring Cera!) which was so grating and cloying and icky-sticky about disaffected yoots and their homogenized, leafless, generic-brand environs—why am I watching an advertisement for something a sane person wouldn't want to buy? The banality of suburbia isn't relatable when it's stereotyped. It's only relatable when it's real, and in the real world, people don't put living room sets on people's front lawns. Plus, when at any point in high school did you want to hang out with the music kids? They were just as pretentious and stupid as anyone else—they didn't possess some wise, warm knowingness about the world that prompts adults to learn things about themselves. They were pimply and ugly and unwashed and gruff and annoying, just like the rest of us! They didn't drive charming little Yugo cars and say funny, stammery things. I mean, they said funny stammery things, but it was like only a joke to people three rings out of their circle.
I guess I just wish that kids could still be kids, and not slinking, faux-riot grrl ciphers or minnowy virgin boys with soft mushy hearts. Seventeen-year-olds just aren't that complex. The funny thing about a rebellious, anti-establishment man movie like this is that it's actually the exact same thing as Gossip Girl—silly, aspirational garbage about grownups in kid suits—only funked up and dragged downtown to appeal to arty teenagers that will be saddened by the film (because they'll never have that, never ever! I promise!) and to people in their 20's and 30's who will falsely remember high school as being just like that when, in fact, they had three friends (their names were John, George, and Judy) and on Saturdays they went to the movies and on Sundays they did their homework and they got drunk at Cindy Mitzner's party that one time and man oh man it was wild. Y'know? It's all one big lie, this movie I haven't seen yet and only know a little about.
Sure John Hughes lied and Richard Linklater lied and Amy Heckerling lied, but they did so with style and without that sort of savvy young hipshit wearing jeans and a skinny tie in a sprawling loft office on lower Broadway making a coy marketing pitch kind of thing. Do I make any sense here? Am I just pissing into the wind? Probably not and probably yes, respectively.
Either way, I'm totes seeing it on Sunday.
Send an email to Richard Lawson, the author of this post, at richardl@gawker.com.
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