Friday, January 8, 2010

Michael Cera's Best Performance Yet: Youth In Revolt Review


This movie had everything a smart teen comedy should. When I say smart, I mean this film has nothing in common with the endless spinoffs of American Pie being passed off as "teen comedies" today.

Michael Cera has defined his young career with this movie.

His ability to portray the split personality between the main character, Nick, and his alter-ego, Francois, is a staple in teen comedy history. Nick creates Francois while meeting the girl of his dreams, in order to be the bad-boy that she wants.

Through Francois, Nick is able to do things he would never dream of doing, like stealing his fathers' car and talking back to police officers.

Cera pulls off constant laughs as Nick, doing what he does best as the awkward, love struck loser. But, in the scenes where Francois Dillinger is on the screen, Cera transforms into an equally hilarious bad-boy with an attitude that keeps the laughs coming.

The cast of this film worked great around Cera and made this film extremely enjoyable and clever. It is arguably the best cast in a teen comedy since the original American Pie.

Portia Doubleday plays a great role as Nick's love-interest Sheeni. She is everything from mysterious to artsy and is a great character to watch while she pushes Nick to be bad.

With a touch of Zach Galifianakis as Nick's mother's deadbeat boyfriend, a sprinkle of Justin Long as Nick's love interest's stoner brother, a few scenes of Ray Liotta as a smarmy cop, a little of Steve Buschemi as Nick's father, and finally Fred Willard as the creepy neighbor makes this movie one of the best comedies of the year.

In the film, Cera's character Nick goes from being a vinyl listening virgin to burning down half of his town to get the girl of his dreams to love him, and along the way takes viewers on a hilarious ride full of awkward teen moments and great interactions with those adults around him.

I'm going to give this film an A-. The only real place I found problematic was the speed of the movie. There were a lot of crazy things going on in a relatively short film, compared to others out now like Sherlock Holmes and Avatar.

It is a great comedy that is extremely clever with its split-personality plot line and is 100% worth going to the movies to see.

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