Fletch's Film Review: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Like most people that write movie reviews regularly, I have an unwritten rule about not reading other reviews of a film before I write my own (much less before I see a film), unless I don't particularly care about the film in question. This rule has a couple exceptions, naturally. On a typical night when Mrs. Fletch and I return from a trip to the theater, I can often be found reading the review of the film we saw that's featured in Entertainment Weekly, the (Phoenix) New Times, or both. Still, when I do read those, I try not to let them pepper their thoughts into my reviews, choosing instead to try and forget them as quickly as I read them.

This time, however, I can't get the words of New Times reviewer Robert Wilonsky out of mind, if only because they were in such sharp contrast to my thoughts while immediately leaving the theater.

In his short review, Wilonsky compares and contrasts Nick and Norah to director Peter Sollett's 2002 film, Raising Victor Vargas. In conclusion, he states, "From its indier-than-thou soundtrack...to its split-second hipster cameos (Devendra Banhart, Seth Meyers, John Cho, Kevin Corrigan), this after-hours romantic comedy plays like the exact opposite of Victor Vargas: Where that movie was organic, with every scene hitting just the right note and feeling so magically accidental, Nick and Norah plays like something crafted in a lab by 54-year-old hucksters trying to sell shit to the kids under the cheerless guise of "alternative." Now, I haven't seen Victor Vargas, but while watching Nick and Norah (and the audience), two things struck me more than anything else: 1) I was in the midst of one of those defining "old" experiences where I felt like I was missing something that "the kids" were in on, and 2) this movie felt real, and probably more real to the tweens in the audience than it ever would to me.

Though the plot and some of the writing is pretty standard fare (think Swingers meets Harold & Kumar minus 10 years), the movie was a sort of revelation. This film that features multiple gay characters (and a trip to an underground gay club), the aforementioned indie-rock soundtrack, and a jaunt into the "queercore" scene (which, of course, I've never heard of), is not an independent film; it's a major motion picture released by Columbia Pictures and starring faces from blockbuster comedies. And yet, there was no great hullabaloo about anyone's orientation or religion - these topics that so many people so many years older than the cast can't get over were just part of the character's lives - with no more thought put to them than the clothes on the character's backs. These "plot points" didn't feel manufactured by some studio exec to me - they felt exactly the opposite, as though somehow this film had escaped focus groups and tweaking and homogenizing to the point that no one anywhere would ever be offended by anything.

Whether this has more to do with the age of the actors and intended audience or the setting for the film (Lower East Side Manhattan) is not a question that I can accurately answer. Most likely, it's a combination of the two; regardless, it was damned refreshing.

Fletch's Film Rating:

"Darn tootin!"