What Playlist?

Rating: 4/10 (2 March 2013)

How can you make a movie with a title like Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, with a "meet cute" plot-line sparked by painstakingly decorated, home-made, lovelorn mix CDS being collected by a different girl than they were meant for and then...not have a single memorable tune in the soundtrack? Boy, the music director on this film really missed a great opportunity there. Nick's Cure ring-tone, all five seconds of it, was the catchiest hook in the entire film.
Check out the track listing on the soundtrack if you don't believe me. There was no scene in which music was well-matched with the mood so as to build emotions, and no great songs chosen, so all you ever hear, in cars, in clubs, is just a few blasts of innocuous music here and there. But nothing memorable. I blame the writers as well as the music director for not having created a believable underground music scene or scene-goers at all.
Another scene that demonstrated writers' Cohn & Levithan's ignorance of what it is to love music or be a musician was the totally absurd scene in the recording studio! Firstly, we'll just overlook the fact that the owner of Electric Lady (or any other pro recording studio) is not going to let his teenage daughter bring people over there on random social visits when the studio's not in use at night (and why isn't in use BTW?), and we'll even be so kind as to further overlook how rather unlikely it is that the daughter of a studio boss would necessarily have recording engineering skills herself, in fact we will even be extra-generous and overlook the impossibility of Nick dating someone who had a friend whose Dad owned Electric Lady without said item of teen gossip ever having reached his ears; yes, we'll swallow all that and just skip straight to the scene where she offers to record something, even letting him play a priceless Strat that is just lying around(?). OK, so swallowing all that too; there they are, all set up, got sound in the cans, guitar is plugged in, all Mic-ed up. Yeah! Maybe we are finally going to get to hear an actual song maybe?
Nope, denied! For inexplicably, mere seconds after hitting record, Norah suddenly decides this is the ideal moment to leave the control booth, go in the live room, discuss Judaism briefly, and then get down on the sofa. Leaving tape rolling. Oh yeah, with the live Mic right next to the sofa. I have rarely seen a more improbably twisted set-up for a lame comedic moment (moment being camera panning from them making out on couch to the peak meters going red in the control room).
Can I tell you why this scene stank to high heaven for anyone involved in music? Well, I am a singer-songwriter myself, and no matter how much I liked a guy, if he's invited me to an after-hours recording session at one of the best studios in the world, and we've set things up and I'm just about to play my song, I am going to be super annoyed if he suddenly emerges from the control room and starts getting talkie then sexual, at the top of my first take! What? Ridiculous!
Any musician is gonna be (yeah even a guy would be) taken aback and say: "Um, excuse me, aren't we rolling tape? What are you doing out here? Is something wrong?" It is not romantic for her to join him in the live room just then, but doesn't make any sense at all! In no way is it credible that any musician, including Nick, would just take it in stride and similarly have amnesia about the fact he was supposed to be recording something. I kept waiting for him to say: "Um, do you mind if we lay down the track before we, uh, lay down ourselves? Or at least stop recording?" Then it might actually have been not only a funny scene, but closer to the way people respond to situations in real-ish life. (That cheezy pun, by the way, is a hilarious gem of wit compared to the jokes in the script.)
The only good thing about this film was the giddy performance of Ari Graynor as Caroline. The whole movie should have been about her drunken night of misadventures!