Everybody do the iPod shuffle

Rating: Null/10 (2 April 2010)

"Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" is a routine romantic comedy in which an awkward guy (Michael Cera) falls in love with a sultry girl (Kat Dennings). They don't get along, they realise they have similar musical tastes, they fall in love, they have sex, the film ends. This formula - a giant male fantasy - is so pervasive, it's found in virtually every "romantic movie", be it teen comedy or critically praised art-house fare.
At least "Playlist" has gorgeous ambiance, the film taking place exclusively at night, city lights, fluorescent bulbs and the low level hum of midnight traffic creating the kind of atmospheric backdrop Kar Wai Wong wishes he were able to cook up in "My Blueberry Nights".
Comparison's to Kar Wai Wong's film are apt for another reason: both "Playlist" and "Blueberry" end with love scenes being "captured" by technology in a world in which technology itself "captures" art. In "Playlist" we have the act of intercourse being unknowingly captured by a sound recording studio, love/sex being recorded as and likened to music. In "My Blueberry Nights", however, we have kiss/love "captured" by an overhead security camera, romance being recorded by and likened to cinema. Both films are thus about, not only a love of art, in which music and cinema become our soul mates, but love itself as "art". Love is always a kind of artistic performance, a desire first formed in the imagination, and always imported into the body from outside (often via the fantasies of song or screen).
Unfortunately, other than the gorgeous mood director Peter Sollett instills (his earlier film, "Raising Victor Vargas", was similarly beautifully shot), "Playlist" is too clichéd to work.
Perhaps the film would have played better had it satirized the kind of white-middle-class hipsters it tries to endear itself to. This is a film populated by kids who go out of their way to latch onto "non-mainstream" fashion, alternative music and fringe clubs, all in a desperate attempt to be "individual, man". Observe how one character frets over being the first person to discover a particular band, how another wants a guy solely because she can't have him and another identifies with a boy simply because they have the same tunes on their iPod. Similarly, a trio of gays wear their homosexuality as a badge of non-conformity, whilst an entire city itself seems to be searching for the club in which a rare band is playing, not because they're any good, but simply because nobody knows where they are playing. This is romance reduced to fetishized designer labels, scarcity as commodity, uniqueness as social currency, every choice made based upon notions of being "alternative".
7.9/10 – Like "Adventureland", another recent sex comedy, superb ambiance is undermined by an unimaginative narrative. Worth one viewing. See "Charlie Bartlett", "Pump up the Volume", "The Spectacular Now" and "Ghost World".