don't know who directed; too lazy to find out. yes, in our push-button culture it would require the mere push of a button to do so; no, i don't care enough to push said button. enough buttons were pushed by this movie for me not to wish to retaliate. i think i'll take the high road. like gandhi.
ah, who am i kidding? youth in revolt bothered the HECK out of me. if i were roger ebert (wow, this sounds like the beginning of a song that could have been featured on the soundtrack of youth in revolt: "if i were roger ebert, i'd give you my thumbs..."), i'd say something mainstream yet incisive, like "youth in revolt is a solid representation of the genre of wacky coming-of-age stories." a grandchild of the graduate, a second cousin to i love you beth cooper (i assume--i really enjoyed i love you beth cooper the book, but didn't see the movie), youth in revolt is a story of a nerdy guy who gets a girl of some sort. it has better vocabulary than most teen movies, and knows it. it has higher pop culture references than most teen movies; it knows that too. and it SUCKS.
that's actually not true. youth in revolt is fine. if i hear one more teen boy depiction speaking in elevated prose about frank sinatra and the fact that nice guys never get the girl while when meeting a girl doing nothing but looking at her chests and speaking to her solely because of the fact that she's cute, i might have to puke, but youth in revolt is fine. if i have to listen to one more soundtrack that features nothing but acoustical instruments and lyrics that only make sense by sheer force of high-pop-art referential stamina, i might have to puke more, but youth in revolt is fine. if i am subjected to one more depiction of a slutty mother who couldn't be based on a human woman if she tried, i might have to burn holes in my esophagus with what puke i've still got left, but youth in revolt is fine. if i pay $10.25 more to see self-justifying assholes hiding their assholeness behind an excess of quirkiness, i might lose the entirety of my stomach lining. i might sue modern culture for its replacement. i might win. but youth in revolt is fine.
what made me like it least was the ridiculous amount of self-consciousness behind the construction of the characters and the plot, which is why i blame the author of the book it was based on. this is how i feel the movie happened: 1. asshole writes a book. 2. another asshole gets his or her hands on said book, and says, "people are buying this; let's make it a movie! let's ANIMATE parts of it! that'll throw viewers off the scent of the fact that what they're watching has been done unto death, like the hero that here lies, but without the slanderous tongues! oh, wait, i don't understand that reference! i'm not an erudite freak, i'm a hipster asshole! there's a slight difference!" 3. the director directs the movie. now, i thought the director did a pretty good job. i feel like the scenes themselves attempted to convey humanity, pathos, whatever, a weird veneer of reality with which to wash the total artificiality of what was toward, but it kind of worked for me. if it had been another film, i really would have enjoyed it. and this is despite the fact that i live in the bay area and have lived in santa cruz, and can say with absolute certainty that the oakland and santa cruz depicted by the movie are definitely in british columbia or something. 4. michael cera acts in the movie.
i love michael cera. he didn't make nick twisp likeable, but he did give the character some dignity, and watching him play an uninhibited alter ego in slender white pants was pretty great. he didn't do suave, quite, but what he did was much more interesting--the understated, animal psychopathy he portrayed as francois dillinger's was so much less cliched and so much more awesome than i suspect it maybe should have been.
i am not touching the book youth in revolt with a ninety-foot pole. why do teenage boys always get depicted as assuming that they're nice if they're not jocks? there's nothing nice about nick twisp. he's a dick. the girl he gets to be interested in him is a dick. it's the post-jameson-pastiche-characterization-but-knows-it version of the nanny diaries. or the devil wears prada, take your pick. oh, i said it. i meant it. after all, both of those books got made into movies as well. if you have something to say about the shallowness and artificiality of the human condition, just say it, author! don't cash in on humanity's weakness for things that look cool even if they fundamentally are terrible. the cold war kids, at least to me, show that beyond pastiche lies some form of passion, some interest in truth, and they sell. i bought their cd at a best buy. so come on!
what youth in revolt has going for it is the directing (i think), and most of the acting (cera especially)--it's really not un-enjoyable. which is what makes its evil all the more insidious.
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