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Juno review
Juno is my second-favorite film of 2007 (honestly I've only seen about 30 movies this year and I'm waiting for DVD on a lot of dramas and Oscar nominees like No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood), but it still has its faults. Every film I liked last year had its faults but this (and Zodiac) had the least. I'd like to skip the praising and get straight to the few "cons" in a field of "pros."
One - character dialect. I'm not saying there aren't smart girls like Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) in real life who are facetious and always have the perfect thing to say at the right time. It's just that almost all of the characters in the movie are like that and have that quick wit. If the characters aren't clever with snappy dialogue always on the ready, they're either lame and annoying (Olivia Thirlby, Juno's best friend) or vapid and awkward (Michael Cera playing Juno's baby's daddy). Sometimes there's a mix of both (Jennifer Garner as the baby's adoptive mom). It just made me realize I was watching a movie and it took me out of the experience. The way they speak to each other? It's like one bigin-joke I don't get. Here's a word-for-word discourse between Juno and her friend:
Juno: "I'm pregnant."
Leah: "What? Honest to blog?"
Juno: "Yeah, yeah, it's Bleeker's."
Leah: "It's probably just a food-baby. Did you have a big lunch?"
Juno: "No. This is not a food-baby, alright? I've taken like three pregnancy tests and I am fo shiz up the spout."
This is not the parlance of our time. This kind of language that's a blend of urban vernacular and made-up terms continues throughout the picture between MacGuff and all the other people she encounters. She also references pop culture but gets it wrong ("Thundercats are go," Morgan Freeman in The Bone Collector?) and I don't know whose fault this is, the writer's or the character's. Allison Janney and J.K. Simmons are great at portraying the worrisome parents of Juno but they're never at a loss for words. Even Rainn Wilson, who plays a minor part as a store cashier (who to be mad at Juno for no reason), is a fast-talking derisive heckler. I saw the trailer and his cut-downs annoyed me just after six seconds. I hope with this particular character, that was the point.
Two - character traits and actions. I can accept that nearly everyone the lead interacts with is equally clever, but that's a whole different thing from the quirkiness. One scene early on has her making an appointment at the abortion clinic on her novelty hamburger phone. Not only do they do a closeup on it, but she says "I'm sorry [about the static], I'm on my hamburger phone" and she shakes and hits it so we see all sides of said telephone (as if I was blind and I hadn't seen it in the two "phone call" scenes beforehand). I get it: she's not like everybody else. I got the point as soon as I heard the name "Juno MacGuff." She also feels the need to do some heavy lifting while pregnant and move the recliner she screwed her friend on to his lawn, and there's no explanation for it except she probably saw it in an independent movie from another country.Thirdly (yes, it's on purpose) and lastly, the soundtrack is indie folk pop but Juno listens to stuff like Iggy & the Stooges and she believes '77 was the best year for music because of punk. I know a person can like more than one genre of music, but if she's not cool with Sonic Youth because they're too mellow, she's probably not listening to The Moldy Peaches. Speaking of, there are five Kimya Dawson songs too many. They can be easy to tune out if you're really not down with that though. If you have an intolerance for those kind of tunes, you may want to stay away. Trying not to give away anything, but when one of these songs is finally brought into the foreground in the end, its verses are edited into an order in which they weren't originally placed. Someone (half-jokingly) called me a hipster once because I don't like Panic at the Disco or Fall Out Boy and I prefer the less-mainstream, but I've never seen or heard anything quite like this.
For some reason, I really dig this movie even though I've seen a dozen other indie films like it. It's original yet it seems 1/4 Little Miss Sunshine 1/4 Napoleon Dynamite 1/4 Garden State and 1/4 every pregnancy movie I've seen before (see: John Hughes's She's Having a Baby or Confessions of an American Girl starring Jena Malone). Coincidentally, Sunshine, Napoleon, Garden State and Juno are all from the same studio: Fox Searchlight (Quick question: why do we keep saying they make "indie" movies if Fox Searchlight is a big branch on a tree known as News Corporation, one of the six big companies that literally control 95% of all media? It's far from indie.). I can find a lot of comparisons with other movies and there are a couple imperfections, yet it still feels fresh and I've seen it multiple times and it hasn't gotten old. I give it 8.5/10 stars.P.S. Rent Hard Candy, also starring Ellen Page. Wow.
Tags: academy, awards, cera, cody, cute, dawson, diablo, ellen, hipster, indie
Comment
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Comment by Anthony on March 11, 2008 at 6:43pm - Haha. I've reread this over and over and never caught it.
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Comment by Charlton Normalman on March 11, 2008 at 5:35pm - Helen Page? Anyways I agree on all the cons you had with this film. I felt the dialogue was kind of forced and too hip and it would be very unlikely characters like these would exist in real life. But I really liked this film. Nice review, Anthony.
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