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Juno
From the director of Thank you for Smoking comes a comedy about teen pregnancy. Wow, that sounds like a line from the trailer, but I agonised over how to start this review and that was the best I could come up with. Surprisingly, even though the subject, teen pregnancy, is one with polarised points of view, the film manages to avoid a preaching tone and it would be hard to decide what opinion Jason Reitman (the director) and Diablo Cody (the writer) have on the subject.
As a result of this fence sitting, the film becomes kind of arb and unmemorable. I enjoyed it while I was watching it, but as more time passes, I find myself growing more ambivalent about the whole thing. There were some moments that were amusing, but the use of teen slang made me feel like I was watching a foreign language film, which could explain how it won the Oscar.
The real A-Ha moment came when I finally managed to figure out where Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and Mark Loring (Jason Bateman) were from. (It’s Arrested Development if you really want to know). After that, I spent the rest of the film wondering how they managed to keep Jennifer Garner from crying for so much of the movie.
Dodginess
The underlying story (teen pregnancy) has lots of dodgy potential. The director (Jason Reitman) already has some dodgy credibility from Thank You For Smoking. The production company (Fox Searchlight Pictures) has a habit for producing independent-like films, and so shouldn’t have had problems with a lot of dodginess, and yet the film had zero dodgy to speak of. So much so that it should get a 0 on the Stay Puft Marshamllow Man scale, but I never allowed for that possibility, so it gets a 1. The dodgiest moment was using current teenage slang. If I ever have children, and they ever talk like that, they are going to get the crap knocked out of them until they learn to speak real English, instead of this bastardised crossbreed for which we have MTV and AOL to thank.
Rewatchability Rating
Straight after I finished watching Juno, I probably would have rated it as a 4 on the rewatchability index. However, as the length of time since watching it increases, I find myself less and less inclined to ever watch it again. It’s not bad, it’s just, well, meh, and so it gets a 2 on the rewatchability index.
Most Memorable Quote
This at least was memorable, although, to be fair, there was only one in the movie ,so there wasn’t that much competition. “Doctors are sadists who like to play god and make lesser people scream.”
Final Thoughts
Juno won an Oscar, and normally I avoid Oscar Winners unless the award was for visual effects. However, I got seduced by the blurb and the trailer and let hope beat out the scepticism normally reserved for Oscar Winners. This wasn’t really a mistake, but it wasn’t the brightest thing I’ve ever done either. Watch it, won’t watch it, your world isn’t going to be very different either way.