So, the backlash against Michael Cera has begun. It might be in full-force, actually.

Backlashes are rather inevitable when it comes to young actors who rise to fame on a string of filmic and televisual critical successes. For Michael Cera, these successes were the best sitcom of the last decade (and in the top ten of all time, if you ask me), Arrested Development, as well as the Oscar-winning hit teen pregnancy dramedy Juno and Seth Rogen’s teen-boy-comedy opus Superbad.

But these days, everywhere I look, it’s disdain for this GTA-raised former child star. He’s getting it from Jezebel, he’s getting it from ONTD (but that’s not surprising, since LiveJournal’s largest community is notoriously fickle).

I’ve been trying to figure out the roots for this hate (if it can be called hate, since I’m not sure Michael Cera is really the sort of personality that inspires that level of emotion), and I’m coming up at a bit of a loss. We can probably chalk it up to his relative ubiquity. He’s 21, Canadian, and has an IMDb acting filmography that is 43 items long.

I’m not usually over-occupied with Michael Cera. It’s just that tonight was one of those nights that my buddy Ian got me free passes to an advance screening, as he periodically does. The screening was of Michael Cera’s latest star turn, in the screen adaptation of Youth in Revolt, a novel which I have not read, nor had I even heard of it before this week.

One of the most frequent criticisms of Michael Cera is that he really only plays one character, and that character is very similar to himself. To that, I say, maybe and so what? There are plenty of actors who build successful, long-running careers doing this — from Anthony Michael Hall to Harrison Ford.

In the film version of Youth in Revolt, I’d argue that M. Cera manages to play two separate characters (within the same movie!), though the one who accompanied me to the movie argued that the characters he plays aren’t really that different. Those characters are the awkward teen boy named Nick Twisp (our hero) and his ultra-suave alter-ego/persona by the name of Francois, a persona he adopts in order to win the affections of Sheeni, a confident, intelligent and Francophile blonde teenage girl who lives with her ultra-conservative religious family in a very fancy trailer home.

Sure, throughout the movie realized that Sheeni is absolutely too good and too smart for Nick Twisp, and in the movie’s resolution hoped that she would tell him that. She doesn’t. My disappointment is not so great that I can’t enjoy the absurdist humour that forms the basis of the rest of the movie, though.

Back to Michael Cera. I suppose I do feel twinges of my own backlash against this guy; like Seth Rogen before him, Michael Cera’s maleness means he can be awkward, unconventional in appearance, and still be a movie star. It doesn’t work that way for girls, and I resent that.

I’m pretty sure I’d never want to hang out with Michael Cera. He’s probably a dick in real life. But it doesn’t really matter to me, because he’ll have to mess up pretty badly to override the immense goodwill I have toward him because of one thing. Well, one character:

George Michael Bluth. Awkward teenage comic perfection. I always loved George Michael because he was the only one of the Bluth family who consistently acted selflessly (even the erstwhile moral centre of the show, his father Michael, was as manipulative as the rest of his maligned and maladjusted family).

The point of all of this is that I can never jump on the Cera hate train. I just can’t. Every pratfall, every ill-timed hand gesture and stutter endeared him to me so that it’ll take more than oversaturation to get me off Cera. (What will be the limits of this goodwill? Hard to say. Actually, it’s not that hard. It happened with Seth Rogen and the horrible date rape joke in Observe and Report. I’m kind of off Seth Rogen now, and not even watching his 18-year-old adorability the series DVD of Undeclared over the holidays has been able to wash the taste of bitter, unfunny misogyny out of my mouth.)

CERA, RECOMMENDED:

Arrested Development - One of many, MANY brilliant shows Fox cancelled over the last decade. If you haven’t already, rent it in order on DVD. Die laughing. Revive. Repeat.

Paper Heart – Cera appears in this fictionalized documentary with comedienne/musician Charlyne Yi, and if you like sweet, nerdy romance, I think you’ll like this flick.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist – Not as highly recommended, but if you like movies about teenage misfits wandering the big city, go for it.

If only this were the main romantic pairing in the series.

A lot of ink has already being spilled about the juggernaut of a movie that opened this weekend — New Moon, the second installment in the Twilight series (or “saga” or whatever). And the column inches will continue to rack up, and believe it or not, I’m not unhappy about that. Sure, I find Twilight, its premise, and the vast majority of its characters offensive on a visceral level. But, as many critics are today noting, New Moon’s utter domination at the box office this weekend means that what the industry dismissed as woman-oriented “flukes” over the past year (Mamma Mia, Julie and Julia) possibly weren’t, and it’s not just hormonal young men who want to go to the movies (I’ll skip the Megan Fox invocation here).

Here’s what Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood had to stay on the subject:

It seems to me that while Hollywood felt comfortable dismissing Sex and the City, Mamma Mia (because the audiences for those were primarily over 25), and even Twilight (as a one time wonder), there is no way that these numbers could be dismissed as a fluke.  THEY ARE JUST TOO BIG.  Women and girls are looking for material that they connect with just as much as guys and boys are, but they thing that blows me away about the success of New Moon and even The Blind Side [Sandra Bullock's new-benevolent-white-lady-saves-poor-black-kid movie -J] is that the theatres were just packed with women not caring if the guys came with them.  This was a weekend where the gals went in bunches and left the guys home cause they wanted to see this movie more than they wanted to see whatever their boyfriends or guyfriends wanted to see.

Frankly, despite my personal distaste for all things Twilight, I’m glad the movie did well. If Hollywood things women go to movies, then presumably more movies with women characters will be made. And while Twilight is full of feminist fail — a “heroine” who has no interests or hobbies beyond cooking dinner for her dad and being rescued by her undead paramour, for example — I’m going to take it as a baby step.

Let me be clear that if Twilight is your guilty pleasure, I won’t hold it against you. It’s OK to like bad things. We all do, from time to time. And I accept that the story, for some, is far more true-to-life in its emotional resonance. Read Molly Langmuir’s excellent post at This Recording:

Most of the teenage girls I knew at the time experienced some version of this story as well. But most of us also managed to eventually grow out of our teenage versions of romantic bliss (and move on to the version embedded within Jennifer Aniston vehicles, but that’s a whole other story). The movie makes no room for this reality, though, and simply goes about affirming my early conceptions of love with the delicacy of a chainsaw.

Let it be said that I tried to read Twilight; I even purchased a copy, back when I was hearing rumblings about how so many people loved it. Then I started reading and could NOT get through that damn books, because it’s so boring. Nothing happens in it. So I abandoned it in favour of reading Cleolinda Jones’s recaps. Cleolinda’s gotten a good amount of mainstream exposure recently, and deservedly so, because her work is hilarious. How she sums up the phenomenon:

Emo teenage girl moves to new town, meets mysterious boy, realizes he’s a sparkling vampire; Greatest Love of All Time Omg ensues. In later books, a love triangle forms with the addition of a werewolf. Babies are of paramount importance; going to college is not. Some readers rank the series up there with Pride and Prejudice and the works of Shakespeare; some readers… beg to differ. Severely.

+++

Let’s leave the world of massive media events and return to the humble burg of Winnipeg, where my activities this weekend, regrettably, did not include going to the annual Art from the Heart sale. My pal Mama Cutsworth was DJing the soirée, and I’ve always wanted to go. Thankfully, Ariel Gordon has  a recap of the event.

My own weekend activities were the following:

• Going to the Lo Pub on Friday night to celebrate a friend’s birthday; appreciating that even an onslaught of ridiculous hipster bands can’t cancel out the establishment’s inherent comfortableness.
• Playing mermaid toys and paper dolls with a bilingual three-year-old. (Click here for a photograph of the homemade mermaid paper dolls, which the young one took home and, according to her mother, who made the photo, is still enjoying
• Eating pizza and watching Star Trek on a big-screen TV with my brother
• Setting up my first ever personal Christmas tree. (A process that is, of now, incomplete; details and photos to follow.)

Last night I was at a preview screening Away We Go, the new flick posturing for indie darling of the year. Directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, also known as Mr. Kate Winslet), written by Dave Eggers (Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What) and Vendela Vida (co-editor of The Believer) and starring John Krasinski (The Office) and Maya Rudolph (Saturday Night Live), it’s obviously got a credit listing to make anyone like me take note.

The premise is that Burt and Verona (Krasinski and Rudolph), an unmarried couple expecting their first child, set out on a fact-finding mission, visiting friends and family across North America, in order to decide where to live after they learn there’s no longer anything keeping them in their current town.

I went in with reasonably high expectations, but not too high. I mean, even with an all-star cast and crew things can still go horribly, horribly wrong and in this case they didn’t. But they didn’t go wonderfully right, either, and the movie left me more than a little cold.

Let’s lay out the raft of pluses first, though. It is beyond awesome to see Maya Rudolph in a role like this, what with her being a) a fantastic performer and b) a woman of colour (for whom decent film roles are even fewer and farther between than those for white women). Away we go also more than passes the Bechdel test, something of a feminist credo that requires any movie to have 1) at least two women in it 2) who talk to each other 3) about something other than a man. With a hugely excellent supporting cast that includes the likes of Allison Janney, Catherine O’Hara, Melanie Lynskey, Carmen Ejogo and Maggie Gyllenhaal that shouldn’t be surprising (though given the current anti-woman climate in Hollywood these days, it still is).

Speaking of Maggie Gyllenhaal, I love it when she plays hippies! She was so perfectly cast as an anarchist baker in Stranger than Fiction (though it did strike me as weird they didn’t write the character as a vegan baker, for added authenticity) and she was equally excellent here as an earth-mama university professor whose fervent belief in the family bed and breastfeeding have turned her into a parody of elitist liberal intellectualism. Or, perhaps, that’s just what the movie does. Burt and Verona’s dinner at her upper-middle-class character home rises to a suitably hilarious conclusion involving a red stroller and a three-year-old exercising his autonomy, but Gyllenhaal’s too essentially likeable for me to understand Burt when he blows up at her character, calling her a “horrible person.” To me that’s a script issue, though. Slightly more successfully executed was Allison Janney’s character, a woman whose unstable personality translates into near abusive treatment of her own tweenage children (with hilarious results, to be sure; but as the first stop on Burt and Verona’s journey, she’s the first parenting cautionary tale).

There are many good jokes and funny moments throughout the movie, and frankly they’re what keep the thing afloat much of the time. For me, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t quite make a connection with Burt and Verona; I wasn’t sure why until I read the New York Times review, where A.O. Scott says, “This movie does not like you.” It doesn’t really like the majority of its supporting characters, and it likes its sometimes-bland, often-self-absorbed main characters too well.

I enjoyed the movie, I really did. But it didn’t let me far enough into its characters inner lives for me to really feel invested in it after the fact.