'Playlist' star is Hollywood's hottest awkward teen

Michael Cera always seems to be pining for something: booze and a popular classmate in "Superbad"; the sly soul mate he impregnated in "Juno"; a lovely but forbidden cousin in TV's "Arrested Development."

One thing the modest, soft-spoken Cera does not pine for is celebrity, but he's got it anyway. As Hollywood's favorite awkward teen, Cera has just turned 20 with an enviable list of hits and critical favorites behind him.

He's back in full heartache mode in "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," starring as a high school senior whose obsession over a shallow ex-girlfriend vanishes during an all-night romp through New York with a new dreamgirl (Kat Dennings).

With back-to-back $100 million hits in "Superbad" and "Juno," Cera has quietly jumped to the forefront of young Hollywood actors. He has two movies due out next year and another starting production soon in Toronto, near his hometown of Brampton, Ontario.

Steady, enjoyable work, not stardom and commercial success, is what he aims for, however.

"I never really had expectations either way. It doesn't matter to me. I just like the work," Cera said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where "Nick and Norah" premiered. "I like being on the set and that's what's important to me about being an actor. Things change and come and go, and whatever happens happens. As long as I like it and I'm working with people I like, I'll be happy."

"Nick and Norah" is a boy-meets-girl story that plays out over one wild night. The film opened Friday and had a successful weekend at the box office.

Cera's Nick is so smitten with his ex-girlfriend he devotes endless hours to making and packaging music compilations for her, CDs she thoughtlessly discards. But they have magically found their way to Dennings' Norah, who adores the song selections.

After Nick and Norah share a memorable introduction at a club, they wind up on a quest to find a missing drunken friend while dodging their past romantic partners, at the same time tracking the next guerrilla gig of their elusive favorite band.

It's the second all-nighter Cera has pulled on the big-screen, following last year's "Superbad," which followed the adventures of three underage pals on a hunt for alcohol.

"The one-night idea, I think it's something that people like. Whenever people go to a party or something, they're kind of hoping it will be a memorable night," Cera said. "It's a cool idea. Those nights are great when things just keep happening and leading to other things. It just feels like you're living."

Cera got into acting as a child after he and a friend enrolled in a class that taught improvisational games. One of the teachers told Cera's mother that the family should get an agent for the boy.

After doing some commercials, Cera began landing TV roles in Canada and then Hollywood, eventually winning the part of hemming-and-hawing teen George-Michael Bluth on the critically adored comedy "Arrested Development," the story of a dysfunctional rich family trying to make do after their assets are frozen.

Oliver Stone: Bush's life 'bigger than fiction'

George W. Bush's ascent to the presidency was "bigger than fiction," director Oliver Stone told "Larry King Live" Monday night, describing his soon-to-be released biopic, "W."

Stone, whose film opens October 17 -- less than three weeks before the November 4 presidential election -- said he was fascinated by Bush, "a bum at the age of 40 years old."

"He turned his whole life around and through evangelism and through his faith and his family and he became president," Stone said.

"It's a great fantasy and it happened. It's bigger than fiction," said Stone.

Stone said while he supports Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee in the presidential race, his personal politics didn't influence the film.

"I couldn't make a movie with hate or malice. There is none in this movie. I see the guy as more like John Wayne, which is to say I don't like his politics but he's endearing in a strange, goofy, awkward way, and he did capture the imagination of the country," he said.

Stone, a Vietnam veteran, is known for his critically acclaimed, yet politically charged films. He's received Best Director Oscars for "Platoon," which also won an Oscar for Best Picture (1986), and "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989). He also won an Academy Award for his screenplay adaptation of "Midnight Express" (1978).

From "JFK" to "Natural Born Killers," Stone's films have made him a lightning rod for controversy -- and "W" is unlikely to change that. In the film, he draws a contrast between President Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, whom Stone says was a "far more diplomatic" commander in chief.

"We went to war in Iraq and he did not go all the way," referring to the elder Bush. "So that becomes a big issue in the movie. He didn't get rid of Saddam then and the son has to be -- feels that he has to act stronger than the father because of emotional reasons and there's a lot of father-son subcurrent in the movie. He is challenged by his father and he wants to outdo him, he wants to be stronger than him."

Stone and Bush started their freshman years at Yale University together, but Stone said he didn't graduate with Bush because he went to Vietnam. "I met him years later," Stone said.

During the interview, Stone drew parallels between Bush and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, now Sen. John McCain's Republican running mate.

"I think she's -- she's along the lines of 'Dubya' [George W. Bush] a bit. That same kind of folksy, common man approach," he said. "And she -- it got Dubya elected. He did very well with that."

And, even though he and McCain are both Vietnam veterans, he opposes McCain's views on war and disagrees with the candidate's positions on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Still, Stone said, "Whoever wins this, Obama or McCain, it's going to be living in the shadow of Dubya. I think he changed the world. I think we're going to be with him for a generation."

Stone noted that Bush has earned a historically low approval rating -- only 24 percent, according to the most recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll. "He's a young man, Mr. Bush. He's not -- he's not leaving the scene. He may have low polls, but he's going to be around."

Esquire names 'Sexiest Woman Alive'

Alongside a photo spread that shows her in little more than a T-shirt, Halle Berry talks about being the sexiest woman alive, a title Esquire magazine gives her in its November issue.

"I don't know exactly what it means, but being 42 and having just had a baby, I think I'll take it," says Berry, who gave birth to her daughter, Nahla, in March.

"Sexiness is a state of mind -- a comfortable state of being," she says. "It's about loving yourself in your most unlovable moments."

But Berry, who won an Oscar for her role in "Monster's Ball," can't claim the sexiest-woman honor all to herself.

"I share this title with every woman, because every woman is a nominee for it at any moment," she says.

Struggling With Faith and Gentrification

THE Feast of San Gennaro, the celebration of the Neapolitan saint that transforms Little Italy in Manhattan into a tourist-thronged street fair every September, has made a few memorable movie appearances over the years. It was the bustling backdrop to Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” and the scene of a couple of violent crimes in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” trilogy. This year another Italian-American filmmaker took his turn: Abel Ferrara, chronicler of the downtown underbelly and lately a resident of the neighborhood.

On the final night of the feast last month — also the final night of shooting for his documentary about the event and the personalities in its orbit — Mr. Ferrara was racing up and down Mulberry Street, weaving through the bemused crowds and past the sausage and zeppole stands, looking for things to shoot and people to talk to, and finding material everywhere he turned.

“I didn’t want to shoot during the feast,” Mr. Ferrara said. “But it’s when the talent comes out.” Sure enough, the actor Danny Aiello was signing head shots in the back of one restaurant. In front of another the former Hell’s Angel and “Oz” star Chuck Zito was having dinner. In the restaurant La Mela the owner, Frankie Cee, who has appeared in a few of Mr. Ferrara’s films, was hosting the doo-wop singer Dion and his wife, Susan.

Watching Mr. Ferrara at work — a blur of continuous motion but a lot more in control than he lets on — you can almost see what gives his films their hallucinatory ambience. His movies thrive on a kind of hypnotic chaos, and Mr. Ferrara seemed to be feeding off the din and disarray of San Gennaro, actively looking for digressions. He tried to get a deli owner to reveal who he was voting for in the presidential elections (while a policeman watched warily), stopped for a snack at a falafel restaurant and struck up a conversation with the waiter (“Anyone ever tell you you look like Christopher Walken?”), and bantered with a neighborhood old-timer who goes by Skinny Vinnie. (For reasons unknown the encounter left Mr. Ferrara in possession, briefly, of a pineapple.)

Mr. Ferrara and Shanyn Leigh, an actress who has appeared in his films, have been living for the past few months in an apartment above La Mela. For Mr. Ferrara, 57, the San Gennaro project is a matter of some urgency, a way to reconnect with a neighborhood and a cultural heritage. “If I didn’t do this I would have to come back as a ghost,” he said.

Throwing Incaution to the Wind, Stone Paints Bush

IMAGINE these fantastical sequences from “W.,” the Oliver Stone portrayal of President George W. Bush that opens on Friday: The president is not alone with his dogs when he chokes on a pretzel and tumbles from the sofa; Saddam Hussein is in the White House family quarters with him. Later Mr. Bush flies over Baghdad on a magic carpet as the bombs rain down. And finally Mr. Hussein returns for another cameo, this time to shout insults at the president and his father.

These depictions would hardly be a reach for a director who is fond of monkeying with history. In “JFK” Mr. Stone suggested that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a cabal of gay anti-Communists. In “Nixon” he made that president so epically loathsome that even his Irish setter turned on him.

But “W.” contains no airborne Bush; Mr. Stone cut the scene. And the pretzel incident has no Iraqi dictator, only the two first dogs, Barney and Spot.

“It was wacky stuff that at the end of the day took us out of the movie,” Mr. Stone said in a recent interview in a back corner of the restaurant at the Royalton Hotel in Manhattan. “We wanted to focus on the mind-set of this man. We don’t change anything in his true story. Don’t have to, because it’s a great story. Dickens would do it. Mark Twain would write a great book. This guy who is basically a bum becomes president of the United States.”

The surprise about “W.” is that its left-wing creator made a movie that is not so much operatic or hysterical as utterly plausible.

Revolutionary Hero, Relentless Heroine

Hollywood meets Havana as the 46th New York Film Festival glides and sometimes stumbles into its second week. In “Che,” Benicio Del Toro, wearing a jaunty beret and wispy tufts of beard, wages war against Yankee-supported states in Steven Soderbergh’s 257-minute (with a 30-minute bladder break) historical epic. Meanwhile in “Changeling,” Clint Eastwood’s 141-minute period drama, Angelina Jolie, wearing a jaunty cloche and bloody slash of lipstick, does battle against the patriarchs of 1920s Los Angeles. “Che” and “Changeling” were first shown in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where they were swaddled in hype and hysteria and anointed with tears of critical joy and fury. Other similarities: both were directed by men who have always maintained a distance from the studios for which they profitably work. Both also hinge on bankable Hollywood stars — Mr. Del Toro as Che, Ms. Jolie as Christine Collins — and feature recognizable faces in supporting roles. Lou Diamond Phillips plays a sissy Communist leader in “Che,” in which a distracting Matt Damon pops up as a man of peace. I didn’t notice any pinkos in “Changeling,” but John Malkovich goes all righteous and solemn as a man of the cloth.
Divided into two sections — once called “The Argentine” and “Guerrilla” — the now monosyllabically titled “Che” tracks the guerrilla leader over mountains and through his tactical successes in Cuba before moving on to his catastrophic bid to bring revolutionary socialism to Bolivia. The movie has been described as dialectical, but two parts do not a dialectic make: something meaningful has to happen between those parts. Throughout the movie Mr. Soderbergh mixes the wild beauty of his landscapes with images of Che heroically engaged in battle, thoughtfully scribbling and reading, and tending to ailing peasants and soldiers. Che wins, Che loses, but Che remains the same in what plays like a procedural about a charismatic leader, impossible missions and the pleasures of work and camaraderie — “Ocean’s Eleven” with better cigars.

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

The problem in “Rachel Getting Married” — not the problem with the film, mind you — is that even though Rachel is the one getting married, it’s all about Kym, her younger sister. Kym, played by a decidedly un-princessy Anne Hathaway, is furloughed from rehab for the happy event, arriving at her father’s rambling Connecticut clapboard house on a toxic cloud of snark, cigarette smoke and wounded narcissism. With her pale, slack features and dark-rimmed eyes framed by severe bangs, Ms. Hathaway resembles the silent film star Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box,” except that Kym is less like the curious maiden of Greek mythology than like the box itself: a bottomless repository of guilt, destructiveness and general bad feeling.And yet she is also an undeniably magnetic figure, drawing the attention of her father (Bill Irwin) away from Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and pulling both the film’s and her family’s center of gravity toward the self-loathing, self-pitying core of her damaged personality. And like the family the film, directed by Jonathan Demme from a screenplay by Jenny Lumet, both accommodates Kym’s need for recognition and struggles against it.
The themes of dependency and recovery that Kym brings home in her overnight bag are familiar, even banal. Every unhappy family may be unique, but every addict is fundamentally the same, and if “Rachel Getting Married” had surrendered its story completely to Kym, it would have risked becoming as drab and familiar as a made-for-television 12-step homily.
But Mr. Demme protects the film against such an unsatisfying fate. He is certainly sympathetic to Kym, even as he and Ms. Hathaway conspire to show her at her appalling worst. But he has never been one to restrict his sympathies, and the wonderful thing about “Rachel Getting Married” is how expansive it seems, in spite of the limits of its scope and the modesty of its ambitions. It’s a small movie, and in some ways a very sad one, but it has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)

As thin as an iPod Nano, as full of adolescent self-display as a Facebook page, “Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist” strives to capture, in meticulous detail, what it’s like to be young right now. Working from a popular novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan (and an idiomatically spot-on screenplay by Lorene Scafaria) the director, Peter Sollett, spins a shy, sweet romance around a carefully chosen soundtrack with music (and cameo appearances) by such emblems of up-to-the-minute hipster credibility as the singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart and the band Bishop Allen, among others.Nick and Norah, New Jersey high school students bouncing through the rock clubs of New York, are drawn together by their shared musical passions (in particular for an enigmatic band called Where’s Fluffy). The tunes that play alongside their nocturnal adventure express longing, sadness, anxiety and joy with more intensity than they can muster themselves. Nick, played by the wet-noodle heartthrob Michael Cera (“Juno,” “Superbad”) and Norah (Kat Dennings, who has a hint of Kate Winslet’s soft, smart loveliness in her face) are, like so many kids these days, most comfortable with diffidence, understatement and a deadpan style of address that collapses the distinction between irony and sincerity.
Norah’s wary, pouty manner and Nick’s odd mix of timidity and sarcasm are both strategies of self-protection. He has recently been dumped by Tris (Alex Dziena), a schoolmate of Norah’s and one of her social oppressors. She has a sometime boyfriend (Jay Baruchel) and, behind her mask of indifference, a lot of self-doubt. The daughter of a recording industry big shot, Norah is never sure if anyone likes her for herself. Nick, for his part, seems unsure about whether he likes himself at all.

Catching the Heartbeat and Fragmented Poetry of the Delta

There isn’t much talk and not a drop of cynicism in “Ballast,” Lance Hammer’s austerely elegant, emotionally unadorned riff on life and death in the Mississippi Delta. Shot with a sure hand and a cast of unknowns, the film doesn’t so much tell a story as develop a tone and root around a place that, despite the intimate camerawork, remains shrouded in ambiguity. Mr. Hammer puts in the time, but never asserts that he knows this world and his black characters from the inside out, a wise choice for a white boy playing the blues.

Taken on its own, “Ballast,” which has been making the international festival rounds with great success since its premiere at Sundance in January, offers plenty to chew on. Shot on 35-millimeter film by the British cinematographer Lol Crawley, it opens with a hand-held camera trailing after a boy of around 12, James (JimMyron Ross), looking and then walking toward — and soon running at — hundreds, thousands, of geese noisily taking flight into the blue winter sky. The boy doesn’t say a word as he watches this screeching mass, yet a feeling of loneliness, thick as a winter coat and every bit as palpable as those darkly swirling birds (surging like storm clouds, like waves), settles around him.

More moody skies follow, interspersed with words that, with few exceptions, sound as unrehearsed as life. Through a series of short, elliptical scenes, fragments of beauty caught as if on the fly, you learn that James lives in a cramped trailer with his single, hard-working mother, Marlee (Tarra Riggs), though mostly what he does is drift. Visibly bored, seemingly friendless, he putt-putts across his unnamed township on a small motorbike and sniffs around the local bad element, adolescent thugs offering perilous companionship and crack cocaine. Despite all this drifting, the film remains grounded, tethered to a great mass of humanity named Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.), who increasingly fills the screen and gives this exceptionally fine feature debut both its title and heart.

Mr. Hammer developed “Ballast” with his mostly untrained actors over several months of rehearsal. Although the results generally look and sound more authentic, more real (whatever that means!) than even most American independent fare, the film nevertheless ebbs and flows like fiction. It builds on a series of incidents — a suicide, an attempted suicide, some bloody hooliganism and a misfired gun — any one of which would have given most of us enough excitement (and barroom anecdotes) to last a lifetime. It’s the kind of dramatic pileup that bodes ill in many films, but here feels natural as air largely because Mr. Hammer’s visual style — at once spare and detailed, restless and anchored by a classic sense of film space — tempers the story and keeps it from boiling over.

Believers, Skeptics and a Pool of Sitting Ducks

There is no arguing with faith. As the comedian and outspoken nonbeliever Bill Maher travels the world, interviewing Christians, Jews and Muslims in the facetiously funny documentary “Religulous,” you begin to wonder if there might be two subspecies of humans.

The skeptical minority to which Mr. Maher belongs constitutes 16 percent of the American population, he says, citing a survey. For many of them, including Mr. Maher, the tenets of Christianity, Judaism and Islam (Eastern and African religions are ignored) are dangerous fairy tales and myths that have incited barbarous purges and holy wars that are still being fought. A talking snake? A man who lived inside a fish? These are two of Mr. Maher’s favorite biblical images offered up for ridicule.

The majority of Americans, however, embrace some form of blind faith. But because that faith by its very nature requires a leap into irrationality, it is almost impossible to explain or to defend in rational terms.

Mr. Maher has already established his position as an agnostic in his HBO comedy series, “Real Time With Bill Maher.” A recent clash on the program with his frequent guest the blogger and author Andrew Sullivan, who is a Roman Catholic, illustrated how believers and those who doubt might as well be from different planets. They can argue with each other in fairly reasonable voices about politics, but not about faith.

“Religulous” is directed by Larry Charles, whose credits include “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” and many episodes of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” And the movie has the same loose, on-the-road structure as “Borat.” Much of Mr. Maher’s film is extremely funny in a similarly irreverent, offhanded way. Some true believers — at least those who have a sense of humor about their faith — may even be amused. But most will not.