"Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist"In honor/homage/shameless rip-off of better and more skilled writers than myself at The Onion's "AV Club", I have taken it upon myself, nay, made it my moral and spiritual imperative to write about that little thing we all like to mention from time to time, that obligatory half-crooked smile hanging on our face like a badge on a member of Starfleet: it's an officiating sign of position, something that makes it okay for us to do or take part in whatever it is we, as human beings possessing intelligence and standards, should not normally want to. That is, the guilty pleasure.
Really, what's wrong with "guilty pleasures"? Aside from sounding like either a fragrance sold for two-fifty at a Wet Seal (remember that shit?) or a chocolate product, guilty pleasures are about the greatest thing known to man. They're a reaffirmation to us, a reminder that life isn't as serious as work, family, and taxes commonly try to enforce to us day after day. They're a medium that work on their own plane of existence, always ready for us to come back for more. Our guilty pleasures help us through our darkest phases, much in the way a Bible kept on the nightstand remains steadfastly vigilant, ready to spread to anyone who's willing to believe (ie. someone who's not a total spiritually-vacant dickface) the gospel and spiritual truths that mean to soothe us and nothing else.
Guilty pleasures, and I say this to you, average pretentious American obsessed with this mutable, very ill-defined concept of "individuality", are your friend. This has nothing to do with that counter-culture nonsense, lounging in local indie record stores and soapboxing for about three hours straight on why Jean-Claude Van Damme's Street Fighter, is, in fact, the greatest movie ever made, a statement made in perhaps half self-conscious irony and half-histrionically-grounded attention whoring. No, there's none of that.
I acknowledge my love of American-made martial arts films, those special blends of obscured fighting moves and shitty hip-hop that they are. As someone who loves martial arts films of all shapes and sizes, I find these amalgamations of two vastly different cultures fascinating. I paid money to watch Exit Wounds, starring Steven Seagal and DMX, in the theatres. Fucking money, dawg. I was high school student at the time, where my money would've been better spent on In-N-Out Double double's and three-day trials at porn sites, but no. I saw a trailer for the movie, most likely during an equally shitty movie, and watched DMX do a backflip towards his dropped revolver, and my first reaction was, "I'm am so fucking THERE." Subsequently, something in me, something floating in that area between my ego and superego, something innate and on a very primalistic level, prompted me to call my friends and ask them with zero self-consciousness if they'd be interested in paying their retail-job-obtained cash in watching Exit Wounds with me, opening weekend no less. Most likely it was the same primal force at work that prompted my friends, also with nary a tinge of irony their voice, to respond with a hearty "hells YES." My guilty pleasures also include third-person action games that involve nothing more than running in a straight line and pressing "fire", and perhaps, from time to time, female-fronted goth metal bands that sing about dragons and that "darkness" thing with the kind of honest sincerity only possible when one's neighbor is, well, a dragon, or the darkness. Whichever.
So, after my long-winded introduction, I make the transition to this week's, or month's extension of guilty pleasure-mongering. Or, maybe not. Because, as a movie, I'm not sure where Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist falls. Basically, I'm not sure if this movie qualifies as a "guilty pleasure."
On a surface glance, Nick & Norah has all the trappings of a movie that should rightfully find it's way into my shoebox of guilty pleasures, gracefully tucked between "episodes of 'V.I.P.'" and "strawberry-banana yogurt smoothies". High school romance. Check. Hot up and coming young actors. Check. Decent soundtrack. Check.
But, wait! Let's go back to that last bullet point for a second, now. Nick & Norah, much like basically anything Cameron Crowe has touched in his life, is a movie very much grounded in this little thing called "music." It's obvious in the movie's title, and it was very obvious in the marketing for this movie, in which the trailer promised select tracks from bands and artists such as Vampire Weekend, Devendra Banhart, and Bishop Allen, et al. See your local Pitchfork.com for more bands I could've potentially named in that segment. The year was 2008, where soundtracks were less and less becoming selling points, and a trend essentially died out after Bad Boys 2 had that P.Diddy and Nelly reworking of that Atlanta Braves' fight song. A throwback to the days of movies such as Kids and Empire Records, maybe? No, hardly. Nick & Norah, right from the ground up, feels like a very carefully manufactured product, with no mistakes and zero cases of happenstance.
I'll start off by saying Nick & Norah is quite possibly, for reasons I've just elaborated on and for reasons I will soon get into, one of the most obnoxious movies I've ever seen. The opening title screen, when introducing the actors and crew involved, takes place on a yellow steno pad with the names of almost every single band featured on Myspace's front page for the last two years getting a shout-out in the margins of the pages, much like the way a high school student with a short attention span will do so during Geometry class. Not me, that's for sure. During Geometry class, I came up with ideas for fake Magic: The Gathering cards and rules, complete with their own backstory and everything. But that's a sad story for another sad day.
In the movie, Michael Cera plays Michael Cera (the king of awkward-cool, and yet another reason I'm finding it difficult to reconcile this movie as a guilty pleasure) under the alias of Nick, and has just been dumped by his hot girlfriend, played by this diminutive blonde chick I've never seen before, but probably someone who would never go for someone like Michael Cera in real life. Norah is played by Kat Dennings, who my wife is absolutely in love with because she has humongous breasts. Norah's never met Nick before, but there's this kind of indirect infatuation going on. Here's how: in a disturbingly familiar gender-swap of roles, blonde girlfriend doesn't appreciate Michael Cera for the lovable dope that he is and will throw out his mix "tapes" that he lovingly and painstakingly crafts on his WHITE MACBOOK, complete with album art and everything. Norah then salvages these mixes, telling her friend that what she's doing isn't stalker-y, and it's no big deal: "They're just songs I can put on my IPOD."
Long story short, after a series of ridiculous circumstances, ie. Norah kissing Nick to make blonde girl feel awkward, Norah's best friend remaining drunk longer than any bipedal creature I've ever seen committed to either film or literature, Nick playing with his band and stuff, Norah and Nick soon embark on a midnight journey, jaunting from one area of New York City to the next in search of an elusive band called "Where's Fluffy?", a band so wrapped in the enigma of it's own cool that it refuses to announce the location of it's live shows. Normally, a band like this would be, with the exception of painfully cool and in-the-know hipsters, labelled by pretty any sane person as "wankers." But, this is a movie, with Fluffy primarily functioning as this total dickhead McGuffin to drive along the action, and, as expected, the already burgeoning romance of Nick and Norah on their first night of acquaintance, no less.
Let's fast forward a bit: Blonde girl isn't happy Nick and Norah are traipsing about New York with each other on a grand adventure, tries to get Nick back, fails, Nick does something un-PG-13 to Norah in Electric Lady Studios (which Norah's dad happens to own), they find Fluffy but rightfully say "fuck it" and go about their business. And yep, they (spoiler alert) fall in love. Like, hardcore in love. End movie.
Like I said, this movie is one in which I am struggling to decide whether or not it is worthy to of "guilty pleasure" status. Because I'm prone to mood swings much like a 16 year-old hormonally unbalanced teenage is apt to at this point in their life, this opinion might change, but as of now, I remain certain that this movie is not, in fact, a guilty pleasure. The movie is too damn self-conscious for it's own good.
Also mentioned before, everything feels very manufactured and very carefully constructed. Nick & Norah tells the story of a fateful night that two indie kids fall in love and find their connection, but the movie is very insistent on reminding us the indieness of the two title characters. On the back of the DVD box, the synopsis of the movie is very, very careful to point out that Nick plays in a Queercore band called "The Jerkoffs." But, then, here's the thing: The movie is so carefully marketed, in fact, that for all its referential dialogue and shameless plugs of Pitchfork-endorsed bands, it never comes off as smug or pretentious. This is an example of a product serving a very specific audience and viewership, namely this scenester, indie-emo band of angsty-but-not-really eleventeen year olds who thrive on their Myspace accounts for any semblance of interaction, a culture that, as someone who's too nosy and observant for his own good, I understand ever minute detail of but would prefer that I didn't understand it at all. Imagine if Rounders was released around 2005, during the apex of the Poker craze, instead of in 1998, before Chris Moneymaker trudged onto the final table, as it was. It would've received a markedly different response and box office turnount. Nick & Norah, to me, feels like the cultural equivalent of that example: Rounders released during the height of Poker-mania.
That's what I mean when I refer to this movie as neither pretentious nor smug, but healthy in it's obnoxiousness. Everything is so carefully planned and deliberate, the movie never feels offensive, but then it never risks anything, either. For a movie predicated on the unpredictability of youth culture today and the common bonds found in mutual love for musicians that operate on the fringes of what one might consider acceptable, Nick & Norah plays it safe. Moreover, it plays it conventional.
I can't say I hated the movie, but I can't say I liked it, either. I haven't found a word, either real or fake, to express my emotion towards this movie. "Meh" doesn't quite cut it in this regard, either, because here I am, writing about this shit as you read it. I've always found teen movies to be the best, albeit subtlest, barometer for the hopes and fears of the generation they were released. One could say that, given my above descriptions and criteria on which I judged Nick & Norah, a movie such as Pretty In Pink, or maybe The Breakfast Club, or maybe even Heathers, is just as carefully constructed. These movies all featured very familiar 80s tropes and character archetypes, with Heathers going as far as lampooning these characters. Moreover, the culturally insensitive material in Pretty In Pink and that search for identity amidst a seemingly totalitarian, thought-controlling society all scream, in hindsight, for me at least, the culturally decadent turbulence of the Reagan era. And let's not forget those first two movies, making Karaoke staples out of OMD's "If You Leave", and Simple Mind's "Don't Forget About Me." Ugh.
What about Nick & Norah? While it's a given that any teen romance will feature some kind of soundtrack featuring prominent musicians, Nick & Norah's focal point seems to be that of the music rather than the plight of the characters themselves. In contrast to the aforementioned movies, Nick & Norah is a reflection of a time where the internet reigns supreme as a must-have for any young American, and where mp3 players and DRM are very real things. No matter how cliched any of John Hughes' movies were, none of them felt as safely conventional as Nick & Norah. Perhaps this movie represents a cultural changing of the guard, with me, rapidly tapping away at my wilting laptop keyboard, representing that old guard that refuses to heed the call of time. Or maybe Nick & Norah, for it's careful execution, represents a shift in values, and new methods of marketing a product through the usage of preestablished products. It's a sad truth that nowadays, one's individuality largely and primarily hinges on the choice in tangible items, with one's own cultural relevancy predicated on perceptions from others. This includes philosophy, those nuggets of truth packed into tiny volumes awaiting your purchase. There is always that untangible state of mind, which we like to say that no one can violate or confiscate, but what young person growing up in America today actively defines their uniqueness through the way they think?
For someone like me, someone who's at this phase in their life, maturity-wise and maritally-wise, Nick & Norah was a movie I was expecting to tug at the ever-so-prevalent dwindling ropes of that thing we call nostalgia. I did manage to connect with the movie on some base level, but then again, I'm able to do that with any non-action or science fiction film (see previous entry, where I touch on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Nick and Norah's romance is forced, hackneyed, and destined, in the most realistic cases, to not last. In other words, a perfect high school romance. That was the fucking great thing about our high school years: that uncertainty that felt like nothing but guarantees, every small inconsequential step we took filling us with optimism and prospects for that unforeseeable future we only wanted to welcome with open arms. That's what we used to call idealism, before the indie kids came and stole the innocence of that concept away from us.
I think ultimately, I was a little sad after watching Nick & Norah. A movie that should've, by any right, qualified as a guilty pleasure was eventually brought down by it's own self-awareness and lack of confidence in it's own product. I'm beginning to wonder if this strange, tech-driven and image-bolstered culture will ever subconsciously provide us, those dragging ourselves through the depressing finality of life and freedom, with those guilty pleasures we so need. Maybe it's a good thing, perhaps, that our culture no longer grants us access to these nuggets of artistic drugdgery, indicating a, no matter how artificial or fake, rise in standards. But what are standards if but another alien concept if we have nothing to judge them by?
Or, maybe, I really am that out of touch with youth today. Growing up should be a refreshing fact to face, not something that horrifies me enough that I write a pointless blog entry about it.
Really, what's wrong with "guilty pleasures"? Aside from sounding like either a fragrance sold for two-fifty at a Wet Seal (remember that shit?) or a chocolate product, guilty pleasures are about the greatest thing known to man. They're a reaffirmation to us, a reminder that life isn't as serious as work, family, and taxes commonly try to enforce to us day after day. They're a medium that work on their own plane of existence, always ready for us to come back for more. Our guilty pleasures help us through our darkest phases, much in the way a Bible kept on the nightstand remains steadfastly vigilant, ready to spread to anyone who's willing to believe (ie. someone who's not a total spiritually-vacant dickface) the gospel and spiritual truths that mean to soothe us and nothing else.
Guilty pleasures, and I say this to you, average pretentious American obsessed with this mutable, very ill-defined concept of "individuality", are your friend. This has nothing to do with that counter-culture nonsense, lounging in local indie record stores and soapboxing for about three hours straight on why Jean-Claude Van Damme's Street Fighter, is, in fact, the greatest movie ever made, a statement made in perhaps half self-conscious irony and half-histrionically-grounded attention whoring. No, there's none of that.
I acknowledge my love of American-made martial arts films, those special blends of obscured fighting moves and shitty hip-hop that they are. As someone who loves martial arts films of all shapes and sizes, I find these amalgamations of two vastly different cultures fascinating. I paid money to watch Exit Wounds, starring Steven Seagal and DMX, in the theatres. Fucking money, dawg. I was high school student at the time, where my money would've been better spent on In-N-Out Double double's and three-day trials at porn sites, but no. I saw a trailer for the movie, most likely during an equally shitty movie, and watched DMX do a backflip towards his dropped revolver, and my first reaction was, "I'm am so fucking THERE." Subsequently, something in me, something floating in that area between my ego and superego, something innate and on a very primalistic level, prompted me to call my friends and ask them with zero self-consciousness if they'd be interested in paying their retail-job-obtained cash in watching Exit Wounds with me, opening weekend no less. Most likely it was the same primal force at work that prompted my friends, also with nary a tinge of irony their voice, to respond with a hearty "hells YES." My guilty pleasures also include third-person action games that involve nothing more than running in a straight line and pressing "fire", and perhaps, from time to time, female-fronted goth metal bands that sing about dragons and that "darkness" thing with the kind of honest sincerity only possible when one's neighbor is, well, a dragon, or the darkness. Whichever.
So, after my long-winded introduction, I make the transition to this week's, or month's extension of guilty pleasure-mongering. Or, maybe not. Because, as a movie, I'm not sure where Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist falls. Basically, I'm not sure if this movie qualifies as a "guilty pleasure."
On a surface glance, Nick & Norah has all the trappings of a movie that should rightfully find it's way into my shoebox of guilty pleasures, gracefully tucked between "episodes of 'V.I.P.'" and "strawberry-banana yogurt smoothies". High school romance. Check. Hot up and coming young actors. Check. Decent soundtrack. Check.
But, wait! Let's go back to that last bullet point for a second, now. Nick & Norah, much like basically anything Cameron Crowe has touched in his life, is a movie very much grounded in this little thing called "music." It's obvious in the movie's title, and it was very obvious in the marketing for this movie, in which the trailer promised select tracks from bands and artists such as Vampire Weekend, Devendra Banhart, and Bishop Allen, et al. See your local Pitchfork.com for more bands I could've potentially named in that segment. The year was 2008, where soundtracks were less and less becoming selling points, and a trend essentially died out after Bad Boys 2 had that P.Diddy and Nelly reworking of that Atlanta Braves' fight song. A throwback to the days of movies such as Kids and Empire Records, maybe? No, hardly. Nick & Norah, right from the ground up, feels like a very carefully manufactured product, with no mistakes and zero cases of happenstance.
I'll start off by saying Nick & Norah is quite possibly, for reasons I've just elaborated on and for reasons I will soon get into, one of the most obnoxious movies I've ever seen. The opening title screen, when introducing the actors and crew involved, takes place on a yellow steno pad with the names of almost every single band featured on Myspace's front page for the last two years getting a shout-out in the margins of the pages, much like the way a high school student with a short attention span will do so during Geometry class. Not me, that's for sure. During Geometry class, I came up with ideas for fake Magic: The Gathering cards and rules, complete with their own backstory and everything. But that's a sad story for another sad day.
In the movie, Michael Cera plays Michael Cera (the king of awkward-cool, and yet another reason I'm finding it difficult to reconcile this movie as a guilty pleasure) under the alias of Nick, and has just been dumped by his hot girlfriend, played by this diminutive blonde chick I've never seen before, but probably someone who would never go for someone like Michael Cera in real life. Norah is played by Kat Dennings, who my wife is absolutely in love with because she has humongous breasts. Norah's never met Nick before, but there's this kind of indirect infatuation going on. Here's how: in a disturbingly familiar gender-swap of roles, blonde girlfriend doesn't appreciate Michael Cera for the lovable dope that he is and will throw out his mix "tapes" that he lovingly and painstakingly crafts on his WHITE MACBOOK, complete with album art and everything. Norah then salvages these mixes, telling her friend that what she's doing isn't stalker-y, and it's no big deal: "They're just songs I can put on my IPOD."
Long story short, after a series of ridiculous circumstances, ie. Norah kissing Nick to make blonde girl feel awkward, Norah's best friend remaining drunk longer than any bipedal creature I've ever seen committed to either film or literature, Nick playing with his band and stuff, Norah and Nick soon embark on a midnight journey, jaunting from one area of New York City to the next in search of an elusive band called "Where's Fluffy?", a band so wrapped in the enigma of it's own cool that it refuses to announce the location of it's live shows. Normally, a band like this would be, with the exception of painfully cool and in-the-know hipsters, labelled by pretty any sane person as "wankers." But, this is a movie, with Fluffy primarily functioning as this total dickhead McGuffin to drive along the action, and, as expected, the already burgeoning romance of Nick and Norah on their first night of acquaintance, no less.
Let's fast forward a bit: Blonde girl isn't happy Nick and Norah are traipsing about New York with each other on a grand adventure, tries to get Nick back, fails, Nick does something un-PG-13 to Norah in Electric Lady Studios (which Norah's dad happens to own), they find Fluffy but rightfully say "fuck it" and go about their business. And yep, they (spoiler alert) fall in love. Like, hardcore in love. End movie.
Like I said, this movie is one in which I am struggling to decide whether or not it is worthy to of "guilty pleasure" status. Because I'm prone to mood swings much like a 16 year-old hormonally unbalanced teenage is apt to at this point in their life, this opinion might change, but as of now, I remain certain that this movie is not, in fact, a guilty pleasure. The movie is too damn self-conscious for it's own good.
Also mentioned before, everything feels very manufactured and very carefully constructed. Nick & Norah tells the story of a fateful night that two indie kids fall in love and find their connection, but the movie is very insistent on reminding us the indieness of the two title characters. On the back of the DVD box, the synopsis of the movie is very, very careful to point out that Nick plays in a Queercore band called "The Jerkoffs." But, then, here's the thing: The movie is so carefully marketed, in fact, that for all its referential dialogue and shameless plugs of Pitchfork-endorsed bands, it never comes off as smug or pretentious. This is an example of a product serving a very specific audience and viewership, namely this scenester, indie-emo band of angsty-but-not-really eleventeen year olds who thrive on their Myspace accounts for any semblance of interaction, a culture that, as someone who's too nosy and observant for his own good, I understand ever minute detail of but would prefer that I didn't understand it at all. Imagine if Rounders was released around 2005, during the apex of the Poker craze, instead of in 1998, before Chris Moneymaker trudged onto the final table, as it was. It would've received a markedly different response and box office turnount. Nick & Norah, to me, feels like the cultural equivalent of that example: Rounders released during the height of Poker-mania.
That's what I mean when I refer to this movie as neither pretentious nor smug, but healthy in it's obnoxiousness. Everything is so carefully planned and deliberate, the movie never feels offensive, but then it never risks anything, either. For a movie predicated on the unpredictability of youth culture today and the common bonds found in mutual love for musicians that operate on the fringes of what one might consider acceptable, Nick & Norah plays it safe. Moreover, it plays it conventional.
I can't say I hated the movie, but I can't say I liked it, either. I haven't found a word, either real or fake, to express my emotion towards this movie. "Meh" doesn't quite cut it in this regard, either, because here I am, writing about this shit as you read it. I've always found teen movies to be the best, albeit subtlest, barometer for the hopes and fears of the generation they were released. One could say that, given my above descriptions and criteria on which I judged Nick & Norah, a movie such as Pretty In Pink, or maybe The Breakfast Club, or maybe even Heathers, is just as carefully constructed. These movies all featured very familiar 80s tropes and character archetypes, with Heathers going as far as lampooning these characters. Moreover, the culturally insensitive material in Pretty In Pink and that search for identity amidst a seemingly totalitarian, thought-controlling society all scream, in hindsight, for me at least, the culturally decadent turbulence of the Reagan era. And let's not forget those first two movies, making Karaoke staples out of OMD's "If You Leave", and Simple Mind's "Don't Forget About Me." Ugh.
What about Nick & Norah? While it's a given that any teen romance will feature some kind of soundtrack featuring prominent musicians, Nick & Norah's focal point seems to be that of the music rather than the plight of the characters themselves. In contrast to the aforementioned movies, Nick & Norah is a reflection of a time where the internet reigns supreme as a must-have for any young American, and where mp3 players and DRM are very real things. No matter how cliched any of John Hughes' movies were, none of them felt as safely conventional as Nick & Norah. Perhaps this movie represents a cultural changing of the guard, with me, rapidly tapping away at my wilting laptop keyboard, representing that old guard that refuses to heed the call of time. Or maybe Nick & Norah, for it's careful execution, represents a shift in values, and new methods of marketing a product through the usage of preestablished products. It's a sad truth that nowadays, one's individuality largely and primarily hinges on the choice in tangible items, with one's own cultural relevancy predicated on perceptions from others. This includes philosophy, those nuggets of truth packed into tiny volumes awaiting your purchase. There is always that untangible state of mind, which we like to say that no one can violate or confiscate, but what young person growing up in America today actively defines their uniqueness through the way they think?
For someone like me, someone who's at this phase in their life, maturity-wise and maritally-wise, Nick & Norah was a movie I was expecting to tug at the ever-so-prevalent dwindling ropes of that thing we call nostalgia. I did manage to connect with the movie on some base level, but then again, I'm able to do that with any non-action or science fiction film (see previous entry, where I touch on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Nick and Norah's romance is forced, hackneyed, and destined, in the most realistic cases, to not last. In other words, a perfect high school romance. That was the fucking great thing about our high school years: that uncertainty that felt like nothing but guarantees, every small inconsequential step we took filling us with optimism and prospects for that unforeseeable future we only wanted to welcome with open arms. That's what we used to call idealism, before the indie kids came and stole the innocence of that concept away from us.
I think ultimately, I was a little sad after watching Nick & Norah. A movie that should've, by any right, qualified as a guilty pleasure was eventually brought down by it's own self-awareness and lack of confidence in it's own product. I'm beginning to wonder if this strange, tech-driven and image-bolstered culture will ever subconsciously provide us, those dragging ourselves through the depressing finality of life and freedom, with those guilty pleasures we so need. Maybe it's a good thing, perhaps, that our culture no longer grants us access to these nuggets of artistic drugdgery, indicating a, no matter how artificial or fake, rise in standards. But what are standards if but another alien concept if we have nothing to judge them by?
Or, maybe, I really am that out of touch with youth today. Growing up should be a refreshing fact to face, not something that horrifies me enough that I write a pointless blog entry about it.
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