[Movie Review] JUNO
Dear Ellen Page
You confuse me. You really do. That’s all I wanted to say to you on those nights when I stood outside of your apartment, screaming up at you through the rain. But you had to keep going and calling the police huh? So let me get it off my chest here and now. You! Confuse! Me! I mean, I know you’re ‘legal’ and everything so I know that, technically, I won’t be in too much trouble for spanking my chimp (so to speak) over pictures of you that I’ve printed off the internet (wholesome pictures too, I hasten to add. Not ones where your head has been superimposed on somebody else’s body!) but you look, and play, young in your movies so isn’t there some latent, pedophilic quality to the fact that I have such a crush on you? I suppose the fact that I’m ‘spunking up’ for you, the actress (i.e. an adult), and not the characters you play (i.e. teenage girls!), clears me of any wrong doing right?
Yours with a love that isn’t wrong, I assure you.
GAZZ
PS
Don’t listen to anything that that Emma Watson/Harry Potter bitch says! I was never naked, hiding in her wardrobe with a condom and half a copy of The Joy of Sex on her sixteenth birthday! I swear to God!
And that brings us neatly to Juno. The movie that marketers, and the Hollywood Hype Machine (now switching its attention to Cloverfield it seems!), would like us to believe is a) “the little movie that could” b) “this year’s Little Miss Sunshine” and c) “the underdog movie event of the year”. Jason Bateman (one of Juno’s stars) had it right when he warned press at the movie’s premiere to stop treating the film like it was the “second coming” because it could then only fail when it didn’t deserve to. What this is, in fact, is nothing more than a genuinely lovely little movie with a big heart that because of its high-end, overall quality deserves your attention.
It doesn’t deserve for you to look down at it condescendingly when you buy your ticket, as if you’re cheering on David versus Goliath. It doesn’t need you to hold your Juno ticket up at the queue of people standing behind you and shout “I opted out of Cloverfield in order to back Juno!” The simple fact of the matter is that this is a film of sheer quality in every single avenue and when genuinely great films are given wide releases then they deserve to be seen. Simple as. It’s okay to moan about the fact that there are fantastic, high-quality films getting fucked over and not being seen on a big screen near you all the time (Odeon only finally made the decision, fourteen days ago, to show There Will Be Blood when it is released this week! And only for a ten day run! What the fuck?) but Juno is being treat like a companion piece to Cloverfield in the way it is being marketed and spread out on screens so you will find it, and you should make the time to find it. Just don’t go in expecting “the second coming” and let the film steal your heart.
Jason Reitman delivers another solid, slightly left of centre film that, for the most part, works and works well (his visual aside regarding the school’s running team doesn’t work at all the way he clearly intended it to) and is a great follow-up to his brilliant little debut, Thank You For Smoking. His execution of the opening titles and his choice of music are elements worthy of drawing specific, positive attention to.
The cast is fantastic, and I mean uniformly excellent, without a single wrong note amongst them. Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner do great work with characters that deserve more ‘written-meat’ on them. JK Simmons and Alison Janney steal the film in exactly the manner you’d expect them to. Michael Cera is suitably awkward and hysterical once again but I’m starting to really worry about whether the ‘Jon Heder Effect’ is going to come in to play on his career anytime soon and whether he can withstand it. I hope so.
Then there’s Ellen Page. She’s in, essentially, every scene and she has to provide the beating heart and the core drive of this movie. She is so talented, so adorable and just such a joy to watch and to be in the company of that the film literally “becomes” her and her qualities. This is the sort of performance that you see and scream out that it deserves Academy Award attention but it never does and you always use that person as your most recent example of how the Academy is “completely out of touch” with the rest of the cinema-going world. But Ellen Page has been recognized by Oscar as a potential Best Actress so you don’t need to scream and shout or do anything other than acknowledge that, for once, the Academy got it totally right. Her performance is, unarguably, one of the best of the last five years let alone just of 2007.
There’s all this commentary going on regarding first-timer Diablo Cody’s screenplay and the style/execution of her dialogue. I had a conversation with a friend once regarding the films of Kevin Smith and he was saying how “nobody speaks like that” and I argued that I speak like that, I have friends that speak like that and that his dialogue does ring true to me. Complaints regarding Juno are that the dialogue is all zingers and one-liners but no heart. That’s not true. Look at the scene where Juno talks to her parents. That’s a scene that sounds and is played real, to my ear anyway. Cody’s dialogue has its own beat and its own feel that slowly endeared itself to me. Yeah, it’s hyper-stylised and sometimes a little self-conscious and over-written but it didn’t feel any different to me then the dialogue sometimes spoken in a Woody Allen or a Spike Lee movie.
I liked Juno a lot. It had a heart-warming and funny story to tell and it told it well with an extremely talented cast who do great work. It does have a couple of moments that look and feel like it’s trying too hard to be “cool” but it’s a minor grumble in an otherwise lovely little film that I was captivated by in a way that surprised me I have to say.
3 Responses to “[Movie Review] JUNO”
Juno isn’t ALL zingers, but some of the lines took me right out of the movie. If that crap had been scaled back, this film could have been a five-star film, easily. “Honest to BLOG?” Come on! It was fun for one viewing, but I don’t see myself watching it again anytime soon. My sister, on the other hand, LOVED it. I think the amount of exposure to awards hype affects your enjoyment of this film. I’d heard all the hype and walked out underwhelmed. My sister had barely heard of the film and she was dying laughing.
i assumed Juno was directed by the same guy that directed Knocked Up because it’s about an unexpected pregnancy, and Michael Cera stars as Juno’s boyfriend (he was one of the goofy kids from Superbad, a close relative of Knocked Up), but it turns out this is not the case
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