Better Than (Phone) Sex?

I’ve been seeing copies of For a Good Time, Call… (2012) in supermarket bargain bins for a few weeks now, but didn’t really take much interest until I watched Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and latched on to Ari Graynor’s name.*

Here she plays ‘Katie Steele’, a brassy, brazen blonde who holds a number of part-time jobs (including working as a phone-sex operator) to maintain the large New York apartment she inherited from her beloved “bubbie” (grandmother). When her landlord hikes up the rent, Katie finds herself in desperate need of a new flatmate, and reluctantly accepts an old college-era enemy into her mothballed sanctuary. Uptight yuppie ‘Lauren Powell’ (played by co-writer Lauren Miller) isn’t particularly thrilled about the arrangement either, but she’s just been dumped by her boyfriend, who’s heading off to Italy on a lengthy business-trip, and simply can’t afford to live by herself. They’re brought together by a mutual friend (a woeful sitcom stereotype of a “gay man” played by Justin Long), and are soon at each other’s throats… then Lauren loses her job and starts to take an interest in Katie’s sexy side-line, first as a business manager, then as a fellow operative… and along the way they bond and fall out and make up again. SPOILER!!!

At its heart, this movie is a platonic rom-com about two straight women learning to love each other… Katie does have a gawky phone-boyfriend (Mark Webber) to bring out of his shell, but he’s really only a secondary character in her life, and he seems to be at peace with that. So, this is exactly the sort of “sisters-before-misters” movie that I wholeheartedly support and wish there were more of… but I don’t think anyone who’s watched this flick would be too surprised to discover that it was the first screenplay that Miller and her writing partner Katie Anne Naylon had ever produced, or that it was shot on an incredibly tight, 16-day schedule. There are plenty rough edges and plot holes, but the two leads deliver such warm and funny performances that by the end of it my ribs felt thoroughly tickled, and my heart had been sufficiently warmed. It is not, by any means, a perfect movie… but is does get an “A” for effort, good intentions, and adorability. I’m actually hugely disappointed that the UK release didn’t include the deleted scenes and DVD commentary track that were on the R1 DVD, because this is definitely the sort of movie where you want to spend more time hanging out with the characters, and the people who play them… especially Graynor, who is now officially one of my fave funny ladies (although that may have something to do with the fact that I see her as a hybrid of Jennifer Tilly and Joey Lauren Adams, both of whom were already on the list).

As for the supporting cast: Mimi Rogers plays Lauren’s mother, who has a pesky habit of popping by the flat unannounced… Nia Vardalos plays her prospective new boss at a fancy publishing company (though from the way it was shot, I don’t believe she was ever on set at the same time as Miller)… and Sugar Lyn Beard plays a suspiciously perky new operator, named ‘Krissy’. Meanwhile, Seth Rogen, Kevin Smith, and Ken Marino all put in self-deprecating cameos as phone-sex clients, with one-hand down their respective pants. Ew.

———-

* Fun Freudian slip: Originally I typed “letched” instead of “latched”!

“Too Pretty For That…”

When I first read that Juno Temple was up for a role in Paul W. S. Anderson’s adaptation of The Three Musketeers (2011), I crossed my fingers in the hope that she’d be playing a gender-swapped, cross-dressing D’Artagnan.* That didn’t happen, of course… in reality, she was cast as the teenaged Queen Anne (aka “Anne of Austria”), who may or may not have had an affair with the dashing ‘Duke of Buckingham’ (Orlando Bloom), depending on how much stock you put in innuendo. Either way, she got a few good scenes here, and it was fun to see her facing off against Christoph Waltz’s Cardinal Richelieu, even if she didn’t have a sword in her hand at the time.

Sadly, several of her best lines were cut, and only appear in the DVD’s deleted/extended scenes… which wouldn’t be quite so galling, if James Corden didn’t get so much screentime as the Musketeers’ intensely irritating “comic relief” servant. Feh. As compensation, there is a lot of love for the actress on the commentary track, with veteran producer Jeremy Bolt telling an amusing anecdote about how a five-year-old Juno had slapped him with a stick when he went to inform her father (director Julien Temple) that he hadn’t been able to raise all the money they needed for the film he was working on! Bless. Fun fact: Anne’s lady-in-waiting was played by Gabriella Wilde, while her husband (King Louis XIII) was played by Freddie Fox… both of whom appeared in St Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold, along with you-know-who.

Meanwhile, Anderson first met Juno while she was filming Dirty Girl with his badass wife/baby-mama, Milla Jovovich… who is cast here as the devious, death-defying ‘Milady de Winter’, and given several awesome action sequences to compensate for the girly ringlets and tight corsets she had to wear. In fact, Jovovich would probably be my MVP of the movie… although she obviously has a “home turf” advantage, and could probably play this sort of character in her sleep by now, that doesn’t make it any less exciting to watch her work!

The same could probably be said for the movie itself… a lot of the plot elements are familiar from countless previous adaptations, and a few lines seem to have been stolen from other (better?) films, but there was more than enough energy and humour to make the story seem fresh and thrilling all over again. Anderson may not be the most critically acclaimed director in the business, but dude knows how to make a rollicking, swashbuckling crowd-pleaser… and, as far as period-films-starring-a-moustachioed-Matthew-Macfadyen go, I’d take this over Anna Karenina any day of the week!

———–

* There have been two films made about D’Artagnan’s daughter following her father into the musketeering business: A TV-movie called La Femme Musketeer (2004), starring Susie Amy, which I’m pretty sure I’ve seen, but can’t remember a damn thing about (which isn’t a great sign, is it?)… and D’Artagnan’s Daughter (aka Revenge of the Musketeers or La fille de d’Artagnan) (1994), starring Sophie Marceau, which sounds like a definite must-see.

No Frou-Frou!

[Contains rope-pulling, curtain-raising SPOILERS!!!]

I’m a big fan of Joe Wright’s previous work, and I always enjoy seeing a little stylised theatricality in films and TV shows, so I was really hoping I’d enjoy the director’s divisive adaptation of Anna Karenina (2012)… but, niet. There were several visual flourishes that I absolutely adored in isolation, but the choice to have the whole story play out on a constantly shifting theatre set was just too distracting, and it distanced me from the characters onscreen, so they never really evolved from pretty pictures into living, breathing people I could actually care about. I don’t want to be too harsh here, because I think the execution of the idea was pretty damn flawless… it’s just that all of that time, talent and effort was squandered on what basically amounts to a glitzy musical without any songs in it… which is rather like a cake made entirely of icing. Ick.

Performance-wise, I think Keira Knightley did a fantastic job with the title role… although, as I say, I was only able to view her romantic rise-and-fall from an objective, dry-eyed perspective. In fact, I was more upset when Vronsky put his injured horse out of its misery than I was when Anna threw herself under the moving train, because of the way the two scenes were shot and edited… something about the effect of her being rolled and crunched by the train wheels made me chuckle, whereas the horse was killed off-screen, so its (imagined) death was far more effective.

Trying to compress a 350+ page novel into a two hour feature film is obviously going to be a disservice to the original text, and I wonder if it might have been better to split the story into two separate films… one following Anna’s affair with Vronsky, and the other following Konstantin’s pursuit of her sister-in-law Kitty (Alicia Vikander). I understand that the two divergent stories are paired together for the sake of contrast, and that splitting them up would ruin this effect, but it would also give more time to establish the setting and the characters and the stakes in each case. If this had been done, however, I can’t help thinking that Konstantin and Kitty’s courtship would have been the bigger draw, since it’s a far more innocent and heart-warming tale of true love, honest labour, and patience conquering all… rather than privilege, selfishness, and jealousy souring all. Konstantin is also the only main character to escape the theatre set and spend a significant amount of time outdoors, which may be another factor in my favouritism… not to mention his long hair and beard!

As a fan of affirmative action, I have to applaud Wright’s casting of Tannishtha Chatterjee as Masha, the ever-faithful ex-prostitute who lives-in-sin with Konstantin’s older brother, Nikolai. She doesn’t get many lines here, but she makes a very endearing impression all the same… and, according to an interview Chatterjee gave to the Times of India, she was very happy to be associated with a project that she believes will “immortalise” her in film history. While I agree that critics and buffs will be referring back to this flashy take on an established literary classic for generations to come, I’m not sure they’ll necessarily be holding it up as the gold standard…

[Note: This post was written while listening to the soundtrack album, which I picked up in a charity shop several weeks ago. Aside from the instrumental score, it also includes a Bengali-language lullaby, sung by Chatterjee herself… though, in an analogy for the film itself, her sweet vocals are barely audible under the orchestration!]

Nurses Anonymous

I’ve been rewatching my Green Wing boxset for the third or fourth time, and while the verbal jokes and surreal sight-gags are still as funny as ever, the soapy storylines are a little too familiar now to stir up much intellectual/emotional engagement. As a result, my easily-distracted mind started to wonder about the Desi actresses who occasionally popped up in small supporting roles throughout the series…

Manjinder Virk appeared in ep #1.7 as the ‘Theatre Nurse’* charged with choosing between “movie genres” or “regional accents”, for the surgeons’ regular game of putting on silly voices while operating (she chooses “regional accents”, in case you’re curious). In a later scene she also throws a metal surgical pan at ‘Guy’s (Stephen Mangan) head (from off-screen) for joking that nurses are “thick as pig-shit”, then sweetly apologises. Bless. Coincidentally (or not) Virk made her screen debut playing a ‘Junior Nurse’ in hospital drama Holby City, and has appeared in three separate episodes of an afternoon soap called Doctors, as well as the late-night medical drama Monroe… though her most impressive achievement acting-wise would be the three award nominations she picked up for her work in a semi-dramatised-documentary called The Arbor (Best Newcomer at the BFI London Film Festival Awards, plus Best Actress and Best Newcomer at the BIFA Awards, 2007). Behind the camera, she’s also written and directed two very serious-sounding short films.

According to several sources, Amber Agha appeared in ep #1.9 as an uncredited ‘Nurse’… though I can’t say where for sure. There were a couple of scenes in the bar, with several nurses milling around and (silently) chatting with the main cast members, so I’m assuming she was one of them… but your guess is as good as mine. A graduate of Cambridge University and published poet, Agha (sometimes credited as “Agar”) is probably best known for her recurring role as ‘Dr. Anvar “Annie” Parvez’ in Murder City, but she’s also appeared in Holby City, and Doctors too.

Chetna Pandya appeared in ep #2.1 as a ‘Nurse’ sitting in the canteen reading a newspaper, who Guy taunts with a plate of curry, mistakenly believing that she’s fasting for Ramadan. She brusquely informs him that she’s Hindu, and calls him a “nipple”. Besides the requisite cameos in Doctors and Casualty, Pandya also popped up in the first episode of Black Mirror, and has a role in Matt Berry’s new sitcom Toast of London, which kicks off on October 20th! As if that wasn’t enough reason to dig her, she’s also appeared in RSC productions with Ayesha Dharker (Arabian Nights: A Tale Well Told), as well as Meera Syal and Amara Karan (Much Ado About Nothing).

Finally, in ep #2.7, Preeya Kalidas had a decent-sized cameo as a cunning  ‘Newsagent’ who out-haggles ‘Martin’ (Karl Theobald) when he tries to get her to comp him a string of Lotto scratchcards, in return for a cut of the (potential) winnings. She ends up winning seven grand, and doing a cute little dance behind her counter, before phoning her mate to broadcast the good news. Of course, by the time she filmed this, Kalidas had already starred in Bollywood Queen, and had recurring roles in Broken News and Bodies… which probably explains why she got more lines and coverage than the other three actresses above. Since then she’s appeared in over 130 episodes of EastEnders, released a couple of singles, and starred in Bollywood Carmen, a Desi-fied version of the Bizet opera which was filmed and broadcast live for BBC3 (and also co-starred Syal, for those keeping score at home).

———–

* Although referred to as “Nurse Richardson” onscreen, she’s not named in the credits.

Sabrina Who?

American Horror Story is back tonight… hurrah! I was too busy working on scripts to blog about the previous season (“Asylum”), but for the record I thought it was great fun. They’ve clearly tried to make the show a little more coherent since the bat-crap crazy first season, so there wasn’t quite the same WTF!? factor at work, but it was still pretty stuffed with incongruous absurdity… Mutants! Serial Killers! Psychotic Santas! Nuns! Nymphomaniacs! Nazis! Random musical numbers! Why not?

My pick for the season’s MVP, both character and actress-wise, would have to be Lily Rabe as ‘Sister Mary Eunice’. I don’t want to go into spoiler-y details, but I thought she was absolutely hilarious, and her transformation from timid innocent to snarky seductress was a joy to behold.

I’ve tried to avoid reading too much about the new season, which involves a coven of witches living in modern-day New Orleans, although I have been keeping a curious eye on the ever-growing cast list. Despite several big-name announcements (including Kathy Bates and Angela Bassett), the casting news I’m most excited about is Taissa Farmiga’s reabsorption into the AHS ensemble. Yay! Apparently she’ll be playing a teenaged witch, and have some sort of relationship with Evan Peters again, but that’s all I (need to) know for now…

Another upside to the show’s return is that it will help to wean me off Sleepy Hollow, which I was watching solely for its spooky supernatural elements, while cringing through the dumb-ass dialogue and stories. Aside from the fact he’s just a poor man’s Sherlock-from-Elementary, I was particularly aggravated by the way their ‘Ichabod Crane’ deserted the British army during the American Revolution, after discovering that “we” Brits were literally in league with the Devil, and that “our” victory would bring about the actual end of the world! Feh.

Hurshe Kisses II: The Recasting

Although Adult Swim decided to blast through the second season of The Heart, She Holler at breakneck speed, airing an episode every night for two weeks straight, I chose to pace myself, so I’ve only just gotten around to watching the finale.

The season began rather cunningly with ‘Hurlan’ (Patton Oswalt) wandering back into the cave he originally emerged from, hoping to find solitude in the darkness, only to wind up stumbling into another reality, exactly like the one he’d just fled! Aside from being a smart, sadistic joke in itself, this also allowed the writers to reset the show’s continuity (!), thus excusing the fact that his sister ‘Hurshe’ looked and acted so differently this time around.

I’m on record as an avid Kristen Schaal fan, but I really like what Amy Sedaris did with this re-imagining of the character. The scaled-up make-up job, combined with various tics and twitches, made her seem far more repellent than Schaal ever did… though sadly, she’s also far less diabolical in this incarnation.

Meanwhile, Heather Lawless continued to ace her Carrie-channelling performance as the dangerously devout ‘Hambrosia’, and even got to play a blissed-out hippie version of her character, when her brain went walkabout. Harsh, but funny all the same.

Overall, I thought this second season was just as curious, hilarious, and nauseous as the first, and I really hope that these mini-episodes are all collected and released on a cursed, soul-trapping video cassette someday… or a shiny DVD, if that’s more convenient…

How’s-Your-Father

The film All in Good Time (2012) was adapted from a play called Rafta, Rafta (2007), which was a Desi-fied update of another play first performed in 1963 (also called All in Good Time), which was itself adapted as a film in 1966 (called The Family Way). Got that? Good.

Despite the ethnic and cultural alterations, the basic premise remains the same: A young newlywed couple move into a cramped terrace house with the groom’s parents, and find it impossible to consummate their marriage while living in the suffocating shadow of the family’s benignly overbearing patriarch. This is very much a masculinist film, concerned primarily with how sons relate to their fathers, and the pressure on husbands to produce heirs of their own… so, right off the bat, it’s not really my cup of tea, but I still found it quite amusing and engaging, in a low-key, small-scale, slice-of-life sort of way. I don’t have any objective data regarding its box-office takings or DVD sales, but the lacklustre critical response and absence of a Wikipedia page, suggest that it wasn’t a huge, breakout hit. Despite some very pretty cinematography (and a lovely soundtrack), I don’t think anyone who watched this film would be particularly surprised to discover that it was based on a play, considering the limited settings and general lack of dynamic action. In hindsight, it probably would have made more sense as a TV adaptation, but these decisions aren’t really up to me.

As I say, the main characters of this story are really the son (Reece Ritchie) and the father (Harish Patel), but the cast also boasts some mighty-fine females in supporting roles: First up was the sublimely beautiful Amara Karan as ‘Vina’, the son’s blushing virgin bride. I’m not sure how I feel about Karan rocking a regional (rather than RP) accent, but she makes the most of her scant screen-time, and comes across as very warm and generous, despite her husband’s dickishness (or limp-dickishness, as the case may be). Next up was Meera Syal as her kindly mother-in-law, ‘Lopa’, who’s keeping a guilty secret regarding her own marriage. Syal and Patel had previously appeared together in the stage version, so they already had their characters down cold, and milk the maximum emotional impact from their characters’ shared (and secret) backstories. Next up was Shaheen Khan as Vina’s snobbish mother ‘Lata’, who gets a couple of good moments, despite mostly being there to comment on what the Dutt family are saying/doing/not-doing. Plus Sudha Bhuchar, Shelley King, and Rani Moorthy as a trio of nosy neighbourhood “Aunties”… and Christine Bottomley as the token whitey, and wife of the son’s boorish boss.

Fun film trivia: Karan’s equivalent role in The Family Way was taken by Hayley Mills, who beget Crispian Mills, who directed Karan in A Fantastic Fear of Everything. Circles within circles, wheels within wheels…

“Stalker-Ass Skank”

[Contains stolen credit cards and SPOILERS!!!]

I missed the first season of ABC’s normal-family-move-next-door-to-wacky-alien-family sitcom The Neighbors, but I was swayed by The AV Club’s repeated recommendations, and decided to hop on the bandwagon when the second season started a couple of weeks back. Helpfully, the first episode began with an in-character summary of who everyone was, to help bring new viewers like myself up to speed, and I quickly found myself getting caught up in the story, as the parents discovered their respective teenage offspring engaged in a secret, inter-species romance, precipitating an emergency family conference in a hi-tech bunker beneath their houses. Unwilling to trust the voting process to determine the teens’ future in an acceptable fashion, the alien father cheats and calls for his son’s pre-assigned “soul-mate” to come down to Earth early, and use her irresistible (and totally literal) magnetic attraction on him. Boo! Undaunted, the boy continues to date his human amour, while his “soul-mate” (‘Jane’) sits outside on the curb, waiting patiently for him to embrace her, like an adorably perky blonde puppy. Bless. Jane’s played by an actress named Megan Park, who’s probably best known for her role as ‘Grace Bowman’ in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, but she’s also appeared in Diary of the Dead, and a Lifetime TV-movie called The Perfect Teacher (2010), which was shown on Ch5 last week…

Aside from seeing Park’s name in the summary, what really caught my attention was the super-trashy premise: “When a teenage girl falls in love with her teacher, she will stop at nothing to make sure they end up together.” And this is one of those rare occasions when an afternoon movie actually lived up to the promise of its pitch. Of course, the “sex and violence” side of things was a lot tamer than it might have been in a more lurid, late-night take on the same story, but it was still fun to watch the movie’s villainess (or heroine, depending on your tastes) graduate from manipulative sociopath to full-blown psychopath, and mow the teacher’s ex-wife down with an SUV! I was kinda hoping she’d go full-tilt GTA after that, and just keep driving over anyone who dared to betray or oppose her, but sadly that didn’t happen.

All in all, it was an entertaining blast of pulpy nonsense, and I thought Parks gave a good performance as the spoiled “mean girl” who could switch to sweet-and-innocent at the drop of a dime. I’m not convinced she can play “bat-crap crazy” though. They kept doing these prolonged close-ups of her staring at the teacher, and I got the sense we were supposed to see something scary and intense going on behind her eyes, but it really wasn’t there. I don’t mean that as a damning criticism of Parks though… I think she’s a very charismatic actress, and she’s clearly got the range to go from cartoony comedy to serious drama… I just don’t think she’ll be the next Nicolas Cage, is all.

Code Name: Joséphine

[Contains mouse-loving SPOILERS!!!]

Since the original Nikita (aka La Femme Nikita) was released back in 1990, it has been remade in American (as Point of No Return (aka The Assassin)), and spawned two separate TV series (La Femme Nikita in 1997 and Nikita in 2010), as well as inspiring countless other fledgling-spy-chick shows like Alias and Covert Affairs… all of which is a testament to the fertility of its premise, which sees a punky-junky juvenile delinquent being trained up and made-over as a sexy government-sponsored assassin.

Somehow, over the years, I’d not only forgotten large chunks of this film’s plot, I’d also managed to completely misremember the ending… which turns out to be far less tragic and climactic than the one I’d been anticipating. In fact, Nikita’s story has barely even begun when the end credits roll, so it’s not too surprising that other writers felt compelled to continue her multi-season-spanning adventures in another medium. There are a lot of films that tell perfectly self-contained stories, which really don’t require or benefit from sequels or televised adaptations… but Nikita is a prime example of a seedling crying out to be propagated.

Which isn’t to imply that it isn’t a fine piece of work in its own right, of course… writer-director Luc Besson has crafted an impressively stylish and compelling thriller, which somehow manages to make a sympathetic heroine out of a (reformed) remorseless cop-killer. That said, looking back, I can’t help wondering whether the incompetence of Nikita’s unseen employers was intended as a comment on the general inefficiency and ineptitude of government agencies, or if Besson was fudging plot-points, simply to drum up the suspense. For example, when our heroine is sent off on a “vacation” to Venice (with her unsuspecting boyfriend in tow), she isn’t informed that she’s actually on a mission until a couple of minutes before she’s expected to shoot a distant target from the (sealed) window of her en suite! I guess it helps sell her cover as a tourist, since that’s exactly what she is right up until the moment her hotel room phone rings, but how did they know she’d be there to take the call, rather than off on some random sight-seeing trip? And how could they set that whole trip up so far in advance, without knowing the actual identity of the intended target until about ten seconds before she needed to pull the trigger? Of course, the big boss was pretty upfront about the fact he hated her and wanted her dead, so I guess that could have something to do with why she was so poorly supported on her missions…

My other slight issue with the film (besides all the synth music) has to do with Anne Parillaud’s casting as the title character. Don’t get me wrong… I think she has the perfect physique for this sort of role, and I buy her performance one hundred per cent in all of the post-graduation scenes (both romantic and action-oriented). It’s just that she was turning 30 when this film was made, so the earlier scenes of her playing a teenage hooligan acting out against adult authority figures rang a little false to me, even before I did the maths. Weirdly, when she puts on a longer wig (loaned to her by the agency’s resident femininity maven, played by French film legend Jeanne Moreau), she looks the spitting image of Milla Jovovich, who would go on to play a somewhat similar role in Besson’s The Fifth Element, seven years later. Jovovich was only 15 at the time this film was made, but I can’t help wishing she’d appeared here as the younger Nikita, to give those scenes a little more authentic teenage angst and energy.

Petty gripes aside, it’s a solid and thoroughly entertaining foundation for a franchise that continues to thrill audiences around the world, and will no doubt continue to do so for many years to come.

Follow The Bunny

[Contains Mix-CD-burning SPOILERS!!!]

Despite having a soft-spot for both of the stars of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008), I’ve been putting off watching it for very petty and personal reasons. Basically, I was worried that watching two cool, attractive young people falling in love on a club-crawl around New York would fill me with envy and ennui. As it turns out, I didn’t have anything to worry about, because the romance here is pretty low-key, and the two leads make such a cute couple I was too busy willing them to get together to think about my own pesky issues.

As per usual, Michael Cera managed to make even the most innocuous lines seem chuckle-worthy, by the grace of his delivery, and there’s no one I’d rather see playing a lovelorn music-geek than him. He may not be everyone’s idea of a matinee idol, but you have to respect the fact that he’s managed to make-out with some of the most desirable actresses of his generation (on-screen, at least). Meanwhile, Kat Dennings was just straight-up, wall-to-wall, full-tilt adorable as the humble daughter of a powerful music producer, who falls for his scruffy, deadpan charms. If the entire film were focussed on their faltering, semi-improvised flirting, then I’d recommend it without reservation… unfortunately they’re surrounded by cartoony-evil exes and “wacky” best-friends, who keep interrupting the flow of their lo-fi affair, like someone mashing up a sweet Beth Orton ballad with an intrusive Katy Perry party-anthem. Ack!

I haven’t read the novel this film was adapted from, but according to Wikipedia the sub-plot involving Nora’s alcoholic gal-pal ‘Caroline’ wandering off on a depressing, drunken odyssey was created to add a little more narrative oomph and gross-out “comedy” to the movie. While I concur that Ari Graynor is a very talented comedic actress (and I love the way she threatened to slap Dennings on the commentary track, for making self-deprecating comments about her appearance), I really, really, really hated the scene where she rescued her chewing gum from a dirty toilet bowl, and then put it back in her mouth. Aside from the mild nausea it caused, this whole sub-plot played like a puritanical warning against the dangers of drinking, in light of the way N&N smugly declared their “straight-edge” status in an earlier scene.

I also think that it might have helped us to understand why Nick was so hung-up on his ex, ‘Tris’ (Alexis Dziena), if we’d seen them together in happier times… because in the present she just came off as a raging bee-yotch to everyone around her. At the end of the film there’s this really contrived confrontation, where N&N arrive at a secret gig (fresh from rounding third base), only to be ambushed by their respective exes, just so they can sack them for a second time, in a weaker way than they did the first time around! Personally, I’d rather the film had ended with the newly loved-up couple staying at Electric Lady Studios, and forgoing the gig altogether (either blanking the phone completely, or reading the text and then deciding not to bother), because it doesn’t make any sense for them to go all the way there, then skip out before the band starts playing, and then decide that they didn’t really miss anything, because being with each other is the main event after all. They didn’t need to physically leave the couch to reach that realisation, imho.

In conclusion, this film was totally worth watching for the Nick and Norah scenes (particularly the “Tikkun Olam” exchange, which actually made me tear up a little), but the more I think about the non-N&N scenes, the less attached I feel to it overall.

Note: The DVD has a featurette on it called “A Nick and Norah Puppet Show by Kat Dennings”, which is basically just the actress playing with paper dolls of the main characters in front of a static video camera… but it’s pretty damn funny all the same. It also makes me suspect that the more endearingly playful aspects of her character on 2 Broke Girls are based on the actress herself… though I can’t really back that up with any hard evidence.