"Nick and Norah" falls short of "infinite" anything

I thought it was very gutsy for the New York City tourism board to bankroll Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. Apparently that's precisely what happened, or else there's just no explanation for the fact that the film was 90 grueling minutes of how cool and hip NYC is.

The film features parentless teenagers who are seemingly allowed free run of the entire city - to include nightclubs - without fear for their safety, or any real reciprocity for their incessant meanderings altogether. But that's perfectly fine because each one is in a band of some sort and enjoys an advanced, post-college understanding of music, entertainment, and literature...so there's that.

It seems that in Nick and Norah's NYC, drunken antics will not get you date-raped or mugged, but will instead summon the collective and complete understanding and warmth of everyone you come in contact with.

Dispensing with the dripping satire for a moment, I had though - erroneously - that every movie patched together with the cast of The 40 Year Virgin, Arrested Development, or stemming from the old Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared days could do no wrong. The actors were just too damn funny to produce anything that completely sucked, despite the occasionally long-winded flicks like Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

I was wrong: even quirky little Michael Cera can really suck. While I usually trust IMDB for their rating system (how can 6,000 voters really add up to an inaccurate rating?) I have to utterly disagree with the 7 out of 10 rating.

Sure, it's possible that I've just not come to terms with the fact that I'm 30-ish now and films about high schoolers who are completely indistinguishable from college students are not going to appeal to me. I mean, not like "Where's Fluffy" the mythical and impossible-to-find band from Nick and Norah. Here's a band that everyone - everyone - universally loves. All ages, all races. They love it so much that - at sunrise - they all flock the streets like it's Black Friday and built up speed with giant smiles on their faces just to hear this band.

My God, I think. This band might just make this awful movie worth my $10. Right at the end of the movie, the band takes stage, and...nothing. Our main characters have sneaked off to have some more teen sex. Then I remember why: because a band universally loved does not exist, just like the characters, city, and circumstances of this crappy movie do not exist.

The fact that it falls short of even delivering on a movie-long promise of the apply-named "Fluffy" is a testament to how flat the entire feature fell.