Life as a teenager sucks when everybody around you is getting some, and all you have are Frank Sinatra records and Penthouse.
C’est la vie for Nick Twisp, Michael Cera’s character in Miguel Arteta’s riotous film that puts the “coming” in coming-of-age.
What is it that we want the movies to do for us? To take us places we’ve never been? To show us people we could only hope to meet (or hope never to encounter)? It’s an interesting question, and how we answer it often determines the kind of movies to which we respond.
In my case, historical costume dramas set in Victorian England tend not to generate much interest. The consistent lack of explosions, gratuitous nudity and careless gunplay generally places the genre somewhere below the Broadway musical-as-film but just above animated family films that stuff pop-culture references into a sack and throw it kicking and screaming into the river of the past.
At least that was how I felt until I saw The Young Victoria.
Okay, I may be a bit late to the party on this one, but with 362 days to go, and New Moon in theaters, I figured I could see this and check off another day, another review.
