Nick & Norah's exclusive clip

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist Exclusive Clip

Book Review: "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist"

"Everyone in this room is connected, except Norah - she’s the kind of statue they don’t ever make, a statue of someone totally defeated".

Norah Silverberg meets Nick O'Leary at a club in downtown Manhattan. Nick is stuck in his usual emo-depressed state due to his recent break-up with Tris, who had inspired him to write beautiful songs. Norah comes from a bad relationship with a very politically-oriented boyfriend, Tal, whom she's dumped about five times in the last three years.

Nick can't stand the idea of confronting his ex-sexpot Tris approaching him with a new boyfriend, so he turns to this girl Norah, whom Nick had been contemplating previously at the bar, and asks her if she'll concede to be his five-minutes girlfriend. Norah concurs to it only because she wants to check out Nick's straightness as a confirmation of her earlier analysis of this attractive musician from Hoboken (who auto-describes himself as a random bassist in an average queercore band) and to peeve Tris, her mate in the Sacred Heart school.

Nick's bandmates are gay and ironic, Dev from a town in Jersey called Lodi (idol in reverse) and Thom from South Orange. Nora's best friend Caroline is feisty, with the long caramel hair, the big cherry Tootsie Pop lips and a promiscuous behaviour.

The story of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist belongs to the young adult genre, although its appeal is universal, since it explores the search for real sensations and everlasting nights in a mix-tape narrative allegory. It's told from alternative simultaneous views by the writers Rachel Cohn (Gingerbread, Cupcake, You Know Where to Find Me), Norah's bi-polar voice, and David Levithan (Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List, Realm of Possibility, Boy Meets Boy) who adopts shy Nick's voice. In the first chapters we can receive a wrong impression by the characters, because the first brushes are a bit harsh, in an intoxicated atmosphere of clubs crowded with frantic doped teenagers, and the boy and girl could come off as self-absorbed and narcissist music geeks.

"Sweat, malice, and hunger pour from me" are some of Nick's first thoughts on set. After their concert, he only can think of Tris' infidelities: "Three weeks, two days, and twenty-three hours ago. And she’s already with someone else. All of the songs I wrote in my head were for her, and now I can’t stop them from playing". These constant negative thoughts turn Nick more broken and void by the minute. It's almost as if initially Nick and Norah were written as two obsessed indie passengers whose purpose is to fill their null soundtracks of their respective mute lives.

"He’s working the ironic punk boy–Johnny Cash angle too hard to be a ’mo. Jersey-boy bassist with Astor Place hair who wears torn-up, bleach-stained black jeans and a faded black T-shirt" is the accurate analysis of Nick by Norah's intensely radiographic girly mind. Her boyfriend Tal and best friend Caroline have made her believe she's possibly frigid and she expresses her fear of being the Tin-Woman in a exhaustive series of internal monologues throughout the novel. She is horribly confused expressing her sexuality with boys, auto-defining herself as a "horrid bitch from the planet Schizophrenia", although she's actually a Jewish valedictorian princess from Englewood Cliffs, a record company CEO's spoiled daughter. Norah had only kissed Tal and Becca Weiner from summer camp until this Saturday. Norah is a lonely creature who only trusts her archive of My So-Called Life episodes as a guide to her romance record.

(We must remember that romance heroines in the literature were princesses, duchesses, or other ladies of the court; "Romance" originally referred to the vernacular French language called romanz. In the 12th century, literature written down in romance was intended to distinguish from official Latin literature. So we could say this romance genre started as an alternative variety, the same "indie" stream Nick and Norah try to rout out.)

Norah often feels trapped because she's hesitating applying for Brown University and her undesired future with Tal, who made her awful playlists filled with YMA Sumac crap and belittled her on a regular basis.

The descriptions of the concerts, mosh pits, communal hardcore energy, and reactions of the underground punk scene are realistically dirty and deafening, allowing us feel the giddiness of sliding into a gigantic pulsating wave from a loud station, fulminating our ears and shrinking our stomachs. I liked the references to random Weezer fans, the hint of dialogue from the film Heathers and memorabilia of rock classics — not very beloved by Norah — as the Beatles, Patti Smith or Lou Reed.

Cohn and Levithan avoid gracefully ribald situations typical of punchy punky teen romance scenarios. Instead, they pen a wonderful vérité representational portrait of insecure personalities plagued with low-esteem and erotical euphony.

In chapter three Nick's romantic side unfolds: "When Tris passes by me it's like the world is no longer 3-D. The third dimension falls away, then the second, and all I'm left with is one dimension, and that dimension is her".

In chapter seven, Nick confesses: "I am liking Norah". "I'm liking that I have to earn her smiles and laughs".

There are various passages that are of high erotic voltage (being the most graphic the intimacy they find in the hotel Marriott's ice-room), with fervid advances between Norah and Nick, as in a scene in the small room to the side of the Ladies Room, which is probably one of the saddest make-outs I've ever read. Nick stops Norah's lustful inexperienced flirting and he realizes he just can't do it (despite his heat) because he sees the unsmiling look in Norah's eyes.

Feeling rebuked by Nick, Norah distances herself from him, misunderstanding his reaction, and looks for advice from Tris. Caroline would have tipped her but she's too drunk (Drunkzilla) and taken care by Nick's gang. The track on list now could be appropriately "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" (The Smiths), as Nick broods: "Fuck her for getting in that cab. Fuck her for fucking with my mind. Fuck her for not knowing what she wants. Fuck her for dragging me into it. Fuck her for being such a fantastic kisser. Fuck her for ruining my favorite band. If I had my guitar, I might be able to make some change. But instead all I have are the songs crashing together in my head. They’re all sad. They’re all bitter. And they’re all that I have".

Norah is also falling apart inside the taxi at the moment the station plays a Merle Haggard break-up ballad. "Happy endings don't happen" - she resents, while an equally tortured Nick is regretting his lack of confidence: "It's not enough to be sitting alone on a sidewalk writing a song for a girl if you don't have the guts to at least try talking to her again". But an amusing phone call will change the separated route of our protagonists, when they meet again in an Ukrainian afterhours restaurant in the East Village, Veselka. In this place both play to have a "formal" first date, eating borscht, confessing their shared fondness of B-sides tracks and the obscure band "Where's Fluffy?".

Thereafter, Nick begins to see Tris as a past girlfriend, a Hot Topic mall hussy who wears slutty short leather skirts, mass-produced “vintage” Ramones T-shirts, yellow leggings and who likes to be a party girl. He's wised up after getting over Tris' betrayal. It's relevant that later Tris is humanized to the point that the readers begin to care about her real intentions and discover she's not the groupie-fatale epiphyte they think. She tries her best to not cause more pain. "I want to — but I can’t — hate her", Norah discloses.

Norah's impressed with the explanation Nick offers her about her Tikkun Olan conversation, and his straight-edge philosophy totally clicks with her: "...the real punk goes down now with a straight edge: no alcohol, no drugs, no cigarettes, no skanks. The real punk now is the only punk left after all the madness: the music, the message".

The intertwined descriptive style of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist never loses its consciousness of the occlusive threats around the night in N.Y., but manages to wrap them with sunny smiles. On the edge of Times Square the rain lightens Nick and Norah's hearts: "she is so fucking beautiful, the way her mouth is uncertain about whether or not to smile".

Instants so lyrical as this one fixate us in such a hypnotic state we won't see the train coming into the subway, or the turnstiles. We're wandering, just as Nick and Norah, walking down Seventh Avenue, not knowing if we’re going to the subway or walking all the way back to the Lower East Side...
Published today in blogcritics.org

Maggie and Christian Bale on "The Dark Knight"

Maggie Gyllenhaal recalls her favorite scene in "The Dark Knight".

Batman himself explains why "The Dark Knight" is even better than the original.

Tobey Maguire for Spiderman 4

"The British Telegraph is running a fairly standard puff piece on Tobey Maguire in the run up to the release of Spider-Man 3, with Maguire spouting the same 'maybe I will, maybe I won't' boilerplate when it comes to the next installment in the series. "They'll definitely develop a fourth movie and write a screenplay, and I would consider it if there's a good script, a good story that I felt was worth telling and Sam Raimi was involved and the right cast came together for it," he says. More interestingly, the paper seems to know something that I don't, which is that a $20 million offer is already on the table for Maguire, should he decide to put on the costume one more time. Maguire was paid $16 million for Spider-Man 3, was signed only for three films, and currently has no other film projects lined up, superhero or otherwise, according to the paper.
Maguire blanches at the notion that he is confining himself to big-budget work: "When I read a script, it has nothing to do with the size of the budget or whether it has global appeal," he's quoted as saying. "I just want to tell stories and play different roles, and I always want to work with great filmmakers." The article also goes into the old story about Jake Gyllenhaal almost getting to put on the suit for Spider-Man 2 before a last-minute intervention by Ron Meyer, president of Universal, put the kibosh on that. In typical British press style, the reporter also feels compelled to point out that Maguire didn't "look particularly relaxed" during the interview, and looks more like a "classroom nerd" than a superhero".
Source: www.cinematical.com

Rendition, Disorder, Affliction

"Rendition" casts Jake Gyllenhaal as a CIA analyst confronted with the process of extraordinary rendition. Supervising a secret torture of a terror suspect, Douglas Freeman (Gyllenhaal) questions whether this practice even works to get information. Since all of this goes on in secret, Gyllenhaal didn’t have any real CIA agents with whom to research.

Gyllenhaal on Rendition: "I never talked to anybody who I don’t think would admit or say they were involved in any sort of extraordinary rendition situation," said Gyllenhaal. "I only talked to CIA officers for fact checking. I think I found that when you talk to someone who has a job like that it's very technical and the questions you want as an actor are a little bit more emotional, but I think that’s a real key into a character anyway. A lot of it was actually watching movies of people who played CIA agents and officers, and then a couple of movies of a couple of people who have played alcoholics".Since the movie is designed to provoke debate on issues, Gyllenhaal hopes that practicality can enter the discussion. "I think that as a culture, I think that the hope in watching this character, that there can be people who can make these decisions, I think it takes you out of the present of what is actually going on. I think there is a lot more muck than we think that there is. I think hope is the wrong message right now. I think really working at it is the right message. I don't know how successfully that was portrayed. I don't know if we did. That's an audience's decision to make that decision but I just wanted to say that." Source: www.canmag.com

"The humdrum corruption of political machinery, the passivity of screen- addled citizens, ignorant pedagogues, job-gobbling immigrants, malevolent divines, greedy corporate grandees, the timidity of bourgeois journalists, the sinister conniving of neoconservative and liberal intellectuals, and homosexuals living in holy matrimony have all been adduced as causes of the national decline. Proximity cannot be denied, yet none of these putative causes appears to be sufficient to the magnitude of the disorder. What can be said with some certainty, however, is that we are now exiles in a strange land; America is no longer America.

In one domain of our national life after another, the old American ideals and liberties have been replaced by their opposites. Torture, once a reliable attribute of Nazis, Communists, and Eastern despots, has become official government policy.

The disease manifested itself almost everywhere at once, but the superficial effects were most spectacular in our national mirror: the Media, which absorbed and digested the once proud opposition of the Press and made of it a mere legitimizer of horrors.

[...] Aggressive, ill-informed, irrational, and largely unsupported opinion predominates in our age of infectious autosatire (on millions of blogs, yes, but also on television and radio talk shows, in op-ed columns, news analysis, and “expert” commentary) and threatens, in a corollary of Gresham’s law, to drive out all other modes of articulate human expression. And by far the greatest number of opinions expressed by any given SSS host concern the doings of celebrities and other by-products of the publicity stream. The relative merits of Denzel Washington’s or Russell Crowe’s latest performances are discussed and analyzed with the same insipid vocabulary applied to the fund-raising prowess and speaking abilities of Barack Obama and John McCain.
What we need is an experimental subject, an “I” sufficiently armed with narrative powers both literary and historical, gifts of irony and indirection, and the soothing balms of description and implication, to go forth and find stories that might counteract the unhappy effects of our disorder. What distinguishes such dispatches is what might be called the radical first person: the individual consciousness of the writer becomes paramount. The reader is thereby privy to the writer’s experience and receives direct confirmation of its truth value. What results is not mere consumable opinion, the mystical commodity of mediated capitalism, but the raw material of a considered judgment, whether aesthetic, political, or ethical. In that judgment lies the cure for our affliction".
Source: www.harpers.org

Jarhead in Blu-Ray

"A trio of action/thrillers can be seen in Blu this November. 8 Mile and Jarhead will be released on Blu-Ray on November 18 and The Kingdom will hit Blu-Ray shelves the following week on November 25. The discs will also all be available in an "Action/Thriller" bundle on November 25 as well.
Jarhead (the self-imposed moniker of the Marines) follows "Swoff" (Gyllenhaal), a third-generation enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back through Middle East deserts with no cover from intolerable heat or from Iraqi soldiers, always potentially just over the next horizon. Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing desert fields in a country they don't understand against an enemy they can't see for a cause they don't fully fathom.

Foxx portrays Sergeant Sykes, a Marine lifer who heads up Swofford's scout/sniper platoon, while Sarsgaard is Swoff's friend and mentor, Troy, a die-hard member of STA-their elite Marine Unit.

An irreverent and true account of a war that was antiseptically packaged a decade ago, Jarhead is laced with dark wit, honest inquisition and episodes that are at once surreal and poignant, tragic and absurd.Special Features
- Feature Commentary with Director Sam Mendes
- Feature Commentary with Screenwriter William Broyles, Jr. and Author Anthony Swofford

Source: www.movieweb.com

Cera and Dennings - UK eonline

He's been in some huge movies, and Michael Cera is fast becoming a force in indie film. I caught up with the Juno and Superbad star over the weekend at the Toronto Film Fest, along with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist costar Kat Dennings, and they dished on why waiting is good, NYC is a star and how they met their new best friends. Source: uk.eonline.com