I finally broke down and saw Juno. I was prepared to totally hate it and frankly after about the first twenty minutes I had no reason to believe I would have to change my mind. I'm sorry but the kind of quirky this movie peddles is just not my cup of tea. I get irritated by this stuff. "It all started with a chair," the heroine Ellen Page tells us at the beginning. And lo and behold there's a chair setting there on someone's lawn. And pretty soon Ellen's taken the chair along with a whole living room set someone's thrown out and deposited it all on her would-be boyfriend Michael Cera's front lawn and she's sitting there chewing on a pipe. Why is she chewing on a pipe? Because someone thought it would be a cute and quirky thing for her to do.Kill me now.
Okay, okay...I ended up not hating it. Here are the reasons I think Juno rises above its own preciousness to become a passable bit of low-key comedy: 1) Ellen Page is an engaging actress with a witty-but-self-effacing way of delivering her me-so-talented Diablo Cody dialogue; 2) Michael Cera is hot in a gangly, tousle-haired way; 3) the guy who plays the editor in Spider Man is Juno's dad and he is one hysterical fucker; 4) Jennifer Garner isn't in it much (damn is her face crooked); 5) it stays away from most of that Mean Girls high-school-as-microcosm-of-society bullshit and focuses on Juno's family and her inappropriate relationship with the husband (Jason Bateman, adorably crinkly in his middle-aged arrested adolescent garb) of the chick who wants to adopt her unborn child.
That being said...this movie is going to get nominated for Best Picture and that is a total load of bullshit. It is not Best Picture material. It's an enjoyable, scruffy little movie with performances sincere enough to rescue it from Diablo's clever-girl calculations (and it is calculating; don't let anyone tell you different - that scene where Juno gets dissed by the sonogram chick and Juno's stepmom gets after her is such a phony "you go girl" moment; and don't even get me started on the way Juno is always so self-aware, admitting to her own immaturity and shit...she's 16 and all 16-year-olds think they know everything and any movie that portrays a 16-year-old as possessing this incredible insight and wisdom is jerking all kinds of different chains). This movie is nothing to get jazzed about - it's our yearly helping of low-budget feel-good fluff disguised as a knowing portrayal of "regular people." Oh, and the music that's supposed to be so darling...a bunch of Mo Tucker impersonators mixed with one actual Velvet Underground tune with Mo Tucker singing is not my idea of a smashing soundtrack. How did they not remember to put a Feist song in there? Slackers.
