Pun Salad

A sweet little romantic comedy, although with PG-13 levels of (as the MPAA puts it) teen drinking, sexuality, language and crude behavior.

Nick and Norah are New Jersey teenagers on the brink of college. Nick is not recovering well from his breakup with Tris. He still produces CDs for her to listen to, complete with cover art; Tris—in a sign that she is a total bitch on wheels—scornfully tosses them into the trash after she gets them.

Norah retrieves them from the trash, though. Although she doesn't yet know Nick, she's impressed with his sensitivity and musical taste.

One night, Nick and his friends, and Norah and her friends, head into New York City to frequent the club scene. Nick and Norah finally meet, and set off on a series of zany madcap adventures. The course of true love does not run smooth, but they eventually get there.

One problem: Norah's smart, funny, and beautiful. But the script portrays her as being insecure about her looks. That would have made a lot more sense if she were played by an actress a couple notches further down the gorgeous-scale. Maybe they couldn't find one of those in Hollywood.

The "sexuality" thing mentioned above made me feel uncomfortably dirty-old-mannish at a couple points in the movie. Also, I kept asking myself: where's the adult supervision?. Parents don't appear at all, nor do teachers, and the only grownups are in menial jobs: janitor, shopkeeper, ticket seller. It really is a young-person fantasy.