Nick & Norah's Indefinite Pronoun

While not a recent release, I’ve been thinking about this movie a lot since I’ve seen it at K. I felt strongly enough about my opinions and the complexity of my arguments to write about it, and so I figured, what the hey, I’ll do so. Here’s my review of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist.

“Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist” is a romantic teen-comedy directed by Peter Sollet, based on a book of the same title by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. It’s meant to be about a sweet, charming romance between two people who find each other through the eclectic melodies of the modern urban music scene, their near-identical music taste bringing them together in the chaos of high school and downtown New York. Undoubtedly, this is the impetus for many relationships in this day and age, and “Nick & Norah” seeks to present a unique yet quintessential story of two people who fall into this kind of romance. However, this “Infinite” playlist comes up aggravatingly short. For all the hype the movie gave itself about sporting an indie playlist featuring names like Vampire Weekend and Modest Mouse, “Nick & Norah” is really not a movie about good music whatsoever. Take a movie like High Fidelity. Those guys knew their stuff, and the movie used its encyclopedic knowledge of great music to explain the inexplicable complexities of life and relationships. You’d think that a movie about two people’s infinite playlist would imply that the film would focus on using good music to effectively accompany some important adolescent-romantic moments, or that they would at least talk about a song or two, of which it does neither. Other than their brief tour of Electric Lady studios and a timid Cure reference, “Nick & Norah” either leaves the music on this infinite playlist as an indefinite pronoun (Nick & Norah’s indefinite pronoun, rather) or stays so cozily in the comfort zone of mainstream music that it comes off as utterly phony. “Nick & Norah” even goes so far as to botch both the selection and implementation of songs by the good New-York-area bands it chose. It feels painfully like a movie about two people who find each other through great music written by people hopelessly out of touch with the music scene they’re trying to capture. In a nutshell, the mysterious location of a concert by legendary fictional band “Where’s Fluffy,” a major theme of the movie, is indicative of what the movie is really about and what this “infinite playlist” contains. Protagonists in the movie love “Where’s Fluffy.” Antagonists utter things along the lines of “oh yeah, I love Whose Fluffy,” to which our cool protagonists sigh and roll their eyes. Throughout the movie, our protagonists search for this mystery concert. After all their searching, all we see or hear of this illustrious band is a few enigmatic slow-motion clips of them waltzing onto a stage in ripped jeans and dingy converses to plug in a few guitars before our protagonists, satisfied entirely with their discovery of the concert, up and leave before the first song, an act that screams poser music enthusiast. “Where’s Fluffy” is the macguffin-like, shallow embodiment of “good music taste” in the movie, that certain hip quality the writers wanted Nick & Norah to have that would ingratiate them with the obnoxious hipster crowd. Sollet would have done well to watch a few music-centered romantic comedies before he got started on his.