Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.

"Peter Sollett's 2002 film, Raising Victor Vargas, remains among the most pointed, poignant, and joyful films about teen love ever made." So begins Robert Wilonsky's review of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist in the Voice. "Now, Sollett can only retrace those steps in this far lesser movie about little more than a boy (Michael Cera, once more in the Michael Cera role), a girl (Kat Dennings), and their friends cruising the streets of NYC in search of the latest, greatest, hippest band in all the land."

"Said band, Where's Fluffy, famed for its secret shows, is the engine that drives our awkward hero and heroine and their cohorts out into the night, and the film is basically a tour of young indie rock New York City, with pit stops all over lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and a cameo by freak folker Devendra Banhart," writes Lynn Rapoport in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "But all the madcap piling in and out of cars and motoring around in search of Fluffy begins to look like work, and so, at times, does Nick and Norah's inch-by-inch romantic progression. A soundtrack packed with signifiers like Vampire Weekend and Band of Horses might not be enough to keep us in the mood, leaving us wishing they would find Fluffy already and let us go home."

Updated through 10/4.

Henry Stewart in the L Magazine: "If the book was like Before Sunrise - a getting-to-know-you amble - the movie is Adventures in Babysitting: nocturnal, episodic and middling, with contrived set pieces, flat jokes and broad archetypes for characters."

"[W]hile looking for authenticity in a film advertised as a Juno-esque romcom about hipsters seems pointless, it's a futile but unavoidable pursuit when the film's humor is so dismal," writes Simon Abrams in the New York Press.

"It's like 200 Cigarettes, only with gum instead of smoking," suggests Eric Grandy in the Stranger.

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek talks with Sollett "about what attracts him to these stories of urban (or even bridge-and-tunnel) kids looking for love, and about what it's like to work with young actors - particularly when you've never worked with grown-up ones."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with him "about he challenge of getting his second film made, crying at The 400 Blows, and the wisdom of John Cassavetes."

Katrina Onstad profiles Cera for the New York Times.

Lisa Rosen talks with Dennings for the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

Updates, 10/3: "Like Raising Victor Vargas, [Sollett's] earlier feature (also about lovestruck young 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 store." AO Scott in the NYT: "Instead, there are a series of small crises and tiny epiphanies, all adding up to a story that courts triviality in its pursuit of charm."

Micah Towery in Slant:

Much to hipsters' horror everywhere, a big studio movie has come out about them (for the confused, Adbusters had a surprisingly accurate article on this "movement" as the end of Western Culture). And it's not only about them, it's an attempt to market directly to them. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is supposed to serve as a swooning missive to the Manhattan indie-kid culture. Or it's at least an attempt to make a few bucks off it. And while inhabitants of this subculture might deny it, Hollywood has unwittingly nailed the essence of what it means to be one of them: the constantly shifting style of self-deprecation, the obsession with knowing about every obscure band months before they become popular, the never-ending search for something, anything, to make them feel unique.

David Fear in Time Out New York: "Cera and Dennings make this rote underage rom-com tolerable; his natural awkwardness and her eye-rolling sarcasm are a peanut-butter-and-chocolate combination."

"Nick and Norah have no relationship to the hero and heroine of The Thin Man, which I urgently advise you to watch instead of this film," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"[A]n hour after seeing it, what the movie leaves behind is not so much a memory as a mood," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Still, it's a fine mood, lit with the sparkle of the Manhattan skyline and scored to a wistful indie-pop soundtrack."

"Nick and Norah is so almost-there that I can't help fixating on the movie it might have been," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "The movie itself seems to be locked in a kind of adolescence; it never quite blossoms into maturity, into a fully rounded whole."

"[T]here are times when Nick & Norah strikes the wrong chord," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post: "Some of the set pieces feel forced (e.g., an improbably ungainly drag show), and a running gag involving a 'shtick of gum' panders too heavily to the target audience's love of a good gross-out. But by the time the sun rises over a bleary Eighth Avenue, Nick & Norah will have won viewers over. It's an alt.romance, dedicated to the scratched-up, slightly warped B-side of love."

"The film drags as it reaches the hours before sunrise, but Cera and Denning's passive-aggressive flirtation keeps its pulse alive," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

"It is a teen romantic comedy that largely fits the familiar template but is also fleshed out with atmosphere, a nice blend of broad goofiness and sophistication, and two appealing leads who bring it to life," writes Michael Ordoña in the Los Angeles Times.

"Nick and Norah is the type of movie that reminds you of other better movies," writes IFC's Matt Singer. "It keeps forcing you to compare it to other things and none of them work in its favor. The musical elitist milieu reeks of High Fidelity, but doesn't boast that film's convincingly snarky dialogue or its flair for romantic gesture.... The Jerk Offs open for Bishop Allen, whose lead singer Justin Rice was the star of a far superior movie about New York's indie music world, Mutual Appreciation. There's a scene in a public toilet that calls to mind Trainspotting and a bad parallel parking gag that recalls Annie Hall."

"Exactly what sort of border has been crossed with the release of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, I do not know—but I am reasonably sure that American culture has entered new territory, with the first teen-date movie to precede the Big Kiss with a discussion of tikkun olam." Stuart Klawans in Nextbook.

"One of the great teen-movie subgenres is 'that crazy 24 hours that changed everything,' which has given us classics (Sixteen Candles, Dazed and Confused) as well as movies that are merely OK (Adventures in Babysitting, Can't Hardly Wait)," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "Put Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist in that latter category - despite an appealing cast and a tone of mildly sardonic sweetness, the movie is missing that X factor that makes you understand why the characters fall for each other and gets you to root for them being together."

Update, 10/4: "Nick and Norah could only have been spawned in a world where band, movie, and book recommendations are no longer offered by friends but appear, unsolicited, in the sidebars of emails," writes Sarah Silver in Reverse Shot. "It's the kind of movie that makes me give honest-to-Blog thanks real life isn't written by screenwriters."

Posted by dwhudson at October 2, 2008 2:49 PM