Word: arteta
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...There was the fruitful encounter in the chair in Juno, and the time we almost went all the way with him on a couch in Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. We would have done it in Superbad if vomit hadn't been an issue. And now, in Miguel Arteta's uneven but occasionally quite funny Youth in Revolt (an adaptation of C.D. Payne's successful mid-'90s book Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp), we watch as Cera, by way of a devilish alter ego he calls François Dillinger, engages in criminal acts in hopes that...
...virginity anytime soon, but naturally, sex is all he thinks about. His chances brighten when Jerry, on the lam, takes Nick and his mother with him to a trailer park near Clear Lake called "Restless Axles." (The film was shot in Michigan, not Northern California, which may explain why Arteta uses Claymation and graphics to depict all the road trips; it might have been a penny saver.) There, Nick meets Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a luscious teenager who is just as pretentious as Nick and not quite as innocent. "I've only made love once," she tells...
...Good Girl tries to have fun with minimum-wage, dead-end America, and it does jerk some reluctant laughs out of us. On the other hand, like Chuck & Buck, the previous film by director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White, it is rather too well disposed to near psychotic behavior. Deranged souls are not necessarily holy fools. And depressed ones--however subversive--are not in the end very funny...
...develop sympathy for anyone in director Miguel Arteta's film, it is for this put-upon couple. We have all been driven crazy, sometime or other, by the peculiar persistence of the unshakable nerd who refuses to take the hint of our indifference, even when it escalates to rudeness. This nerd, though, is in a class by himself. He writes and produces what seems to be an expressionistic but childlike play about their former relationship. When it's over, he offers Chuck a deal: one night of grown-up love and then he will leave him alone...
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