Uninteresting characters make for a snooze-fest

Rating: 3/10 (27 January 2010)

Having liked "Juno", I thought that I would like "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" since it had many attributes similar to that little winner: quirky teens, a protagonist played by Michael Cera, a setting in the North-East of America and a prominent use of indie-music. However, things don't always turn out how we expect, and it actually transpired that I disliked this film. It runs for around 90 minutes, but it really did feel ten times longer than that. I kept on looking at the timer on my DVD player to see how long was left, and there were numerous points when I felt that I ought to simply turn it off altogether and give it up.
The problem is mainly to do with the fact that the characters just aren't all that interesting and are hard to sympathise with; Nick, Norah, and their friends, are essentially anxious and/or lazy teens. Their worries don't really seem all that sincere and it's easy to lose interest in them. Norah's drunken friend, the obvious comic-relief figure, is also just not all that amusing. Perhaps if I were a few years younger and still felt like a breakup or a friend's homosexuality were major dramatic events worthy of international media coverage, then I would feel differently. But I think that to anyone over the age of 17, these characters and their misadventures would seem bland.
The film, I should mention, takes place over the course of a night, and ends at around 5 or 6 in the morning. I became so bored, however, that I kept on posing myself the question: wouldn't all these people just want to go to bed by this point? Obviously I'm simply becoming middle-aged in my early 20s.