- Dear Plot Synopsis: you are blatantly wrong. Here’s the real plot synopsis for the movie (not the book): “College-bound Norah Silverberg meets high school student Nick O’Leary, member of the queerecore band The Jerk Offs, when she asks him to be her boyfriend for five minutes in order to prove to her classmate Tris that she has a boyfriend. Unbeknownst to Norah, Nick is Tris’ ex-boyfriend.” Etc. I suppose this doesn’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things.
- Apparently a ninety-minute soundtrack is what passes for “infinite” these days.
- I find the music in this movie somewhat problematic. In part this is because I have no interest in any of the bands that Nick and Norah profess their love for and thus have difficulty connecting to them and their budding romance. But it’s also largely due to the fact that so little of the music is diegetic and this bugs the hell out of me because music is so central to the characters and yet we rarely see them actually listening to any music. Broken-hearted Nick makes at least a dozen pathetic break-up mixes for his ex-girlfriend, Tris, who promptly disposes of them because she’s not into the same kind of music. Norah, who is frenemies with Tris, collects the discarded mixes because she thinks Nick, whom she has never met, has great taste in music. As the movie unfolds, these break-up mixes for Nick and Tris morph into getting-together mixes for Nick and Norah. This is all fine and good, but 90% of the music plays as a soundtrack, not as something within the film itself. We get a shot of Norah with headphones at the start of the movie, a brief interlude at Nick’s band’s gig, and then a brief and contrived moment of pathetisad wackiness when Nick’s plea for Tris to take him back accidentally shows up at the end of one of the break-up mixes that he and Norah are listening to… and then that’s about it.
For characters who profess to love music so much, they certainly don’t do a lot of listening to it. You want characters who love music? Go on down to Championship Vinyl, which may be hard to find because it’s located strategically to attract the bare minimum of window shoppers. Why is High Fidelity so awesome? Among other reasons, it’s because it actually shows you how much the characters love the music they claim they do.
This makes me angry, clearly. I really hate craftily created movie soundtracks that don’t integrate well into the films they’re supposed to be for. Apparently the person who compiled this also did Garden State, so that should explain a lot.
- Anything involving the incredibly travelling piece of gum that never lost its flavour was gross and unnecessary. The vomit scene? Fucking ridiculous. I know this movie is geared towards a PG-13 audience, but come on.
- There were some genuinely funny lines, but overall I think the audience was laughing a lot more than was warranted. Especially the girl behind me cackling in my ear every ten seconds. She may have been high and she was definitely obnoxious. I swear she was leaning forward in her seat just to blast my eardrums with her irritating guffaw. Ugh.
- The tenuous bit of plot that the rest of the movie wraps itself around is that there’s this band called Where’s Fluffy? that apparently likes to play secret shows that they never announce until the last minute and then their fans have to run around NYC trying to solve the mystery of where the band might be performing. Sometimes the band even does a bait-and-switch where you think you’ve found the show but instead it’s a different band that everyone hates. This band sounds like it’s made up of total dickheads, but I digress. Through the whole Fluffy charade, I kept wondering if I had missed a big viral marketing campaign for this movie surrounding this made-up (I think?) band and apparently I did. Unless the marketing hasn’t really started because the movie doesn’t come out until October but… fail.
- Nick and Norah both have exes whom they waver about going back to when those exes start paying attention to them again. Eventually, both of them realise they’re better off without the exes and with each other and I think we’re supposed to take this realisation as Nick and Norah standing up for themselves, etc. Except when Nick does it? It’s a fucking douchebag move and I cannot understand how the audience actually cheered. Everyone is running around New York all night trying to find Where’s Fluffy and Norah’s missing friend, Caroline, and while calamity ensues eventually they decide to drop Nick off where he parked his geriatric car. Tris is waiting for him and asks him for a ride and seeing as it’s like two a.m., he agrees. On the way home, she convinces him to pull get off the highway so they can go somewhere and make-out and she gets out of the car and starts doing a hideously unsexy striptease. This is where Nick starts flashbacking to earlier in the evening and how Awesome™ Norah is, and he decides to ditch Tris. Like, he puts the car in reverse and just drives away, leaving Tris, a ninety-pound soaking wet twig of a girl, at some abandoned and ill-lit place at the edge of the Hudson River in the middle of the night. I don’t care how obnoxious she is, I don’t care if she had Gary-The-College-Guy as a fall back ride, he just left her there in a hideously scary situation. There is nothing admirable in that and I was pretty appalled. This is not okay!
- Andy Samberg played a crazy homeless guy who harasses Nick outside a church at one point. We think he was channelling Mark Wahlberg in I ♥ Huckabees with his performance. In the director Q&A afterwards we were told that apparently they did a bunch of different takes with different ad-libbed lines and one of the ones that they couldn’t use because this is movie is rated PG-13 was:
Homeless!Mark Wahlberg: How much do you weigh?
Nick: I don’t know, 130lbs, 135?
Homeless!Mark Wahlberg, pointing at his buddy “Switzerland”, a gigantic and moderately obese homeless guy: You’re going to weigh at least 150lbs when Switzerland’s inside you.Oh. MAN. I mention this because the line is too good not to and who knows if it will ever end up in a deleted scene or director commentary. I kept waiting for them to explain why Switzerland’s name was, indeed, Switzerland but they never did.
- Throughout the movie they make continued reference to how Norah’s dad is some famous guy and she continually gets in and out of clubs really easily, cutting in front of really long lines, and so we’re supposed to assume that her dad is someone famous. Eventually it turns out that her dad owns Electric Lady Studios, bulit by Jimi Hendrix (obviously) and recorded in by a variety of other music legends. Nick starts blowing his load and his mind over all this because omg, he loves music! They enter the recording studio and in the control room there’s a white Fender Stratocaster made for a right-handed player but strung for a left-handed player sitting there and Nick starts ogling it. They never bother to explain the significance of this guitar and I have no idea why. Knowing what I know about classic rock, my assumption is that this is supposed to be one of Jimi Hendrix’s guitars, since this is precisely the kind of thing he would do — but is the audience this movie is aimed at going to know that? The only thing classic rock about this movie is the recording studio itself and it doesn’t really fit terribly well into the rest of the movie, both with the characters and the rest of the music.
- My secret boyfriend Jay Baruchel is in this as Norah’s ex/friends-with-benefits guy. He’s in a Jewish rock band called Ozrael, he’s using Norah to get to her dad, and I think he’s drunk the whole time. Awesome.
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Luckily, the movie is not also infinite.
IMDB Plot Synopsis High school student Nick O'Leary, member of the queercore band The Jerk Offs, meets college-bound Norah Silverberg and asks her to be his girlfriend for five minutes in order to avoid his ex-sweetheart.