'INFINTE PLAY' MAKES LIST

Well-Paced Pic Charms Auds into 'Indies'

A feel-good salute to fine music and real friends, “Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist” is calculated and commercial in its core, but passes with an endearing smile. The charming parry-riposte of the lead characters, played by Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, ultimately pushes the film through a diverting, if occasionally meandering course. Fans of the “little indy films that could” will be sated but not electrified. B.O. was okay while in release, and pic is now on disc and other media.

It seems a painful occurrence that a good movie is just a few short hours long. Really genuine characters seem so human; their departure rests upon us heavy, like death, like missing faces. We just want to spend time with someone we really know. Little indy pics are endearing for exactly that reason: the characters can be so sincere. We've been richly blessed over the last few years. Take “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Once,” or “Juno.” We are all looking for the next “Juno.” We want to feel like we've made a friend.

If “Juno” had been paid for by Columbia Pictures, that movie would be “Infinite Playlist.” That's not an insult, but it is true. Fresh off “Juno,” Cera, who will be carded until he's fifty, plays a character who is a wannabe bassist in a wannabe rock band, populated exclusively by his gay friends who eternally drive a van around Gotham. He has a serious looser complex and is hung up over his former girlfriend, who is played to a perfection of manipulative bitchiness by weedy New York thesp Alexis Dziena. This should already sound vaguely like “Juno.” The Cera character is then drafted at a gig into fake boyfriendhood by a passing Catholic schoolgirl, played by Dennings, who you may recognize as a guest actress on various television programs. The remainder of the program consists of various mishaps and missed connections (as Craigslist would say), as the Cera and Dennings characters are intermittently paired and variously propelled across the city in a search for an elusive band, and also an incredibly inebriated friend, who gets lost while under the influence. Along the way, music gets played, bras get changed, and a some kind of a relationship is developed. Is that a film worth watching?

The story arc is predictable, the supporting roles cliché, the redemptions never in doubt. The music cropping up in the film seems calculated, and apparently the scoring director was unwilling to take the risks that made “Juno” so sonically quirky. Sequences are superfluous, particularly the random shots across the bow at religiosity, including the scary church hobos. Most of the subplot involving the drunk friend relies on gross-out gags and physical humor – and when do those sorts of subplots not. Some have complained that the dialog between the leads tended to be gawky. I'll let that pass, though, as dialog in awkward date-like situations can be very gawky.

Fortunately, “Infinite Playlist” doesn't overplay its welcome. It's short, and Dennings and Cera are able to amicably pass the time. If you close your eyes, and pretend that you are eighteen again and in high school, you might believe that something like this could happen to you. And that's all it takes to laugh.