Juno sucked

I really like movies. I’ve seen thousands of movies in my lifetime. I own hundreds of DVDs and I have the full 8-dvds-at-a-time Netflix subscription. I read about movies. I study movies. I really really like movies.

So I get really pissed off when something as shitty as Juno comes along and Hollywood shits themselves over how great it is. Juno is a horribly pretentious, unrealistic load of crap. It bothers me to see Jason Bateman and Michael Cera in it, since I loved both of those guys in Arrested Development.

First off, I’ll address the “pretentious” comment. Everything about this movie is pretentious, from the “witty” repartee, to the jangly music. Juno is a 16 year old high school girl who has the lightning-quick witted comebacks of Hawkeye Pierce and the education of a professor of literature. 16 year olds like that are a dime a dozen… The dialogue is littered with the remnants of a half-assed college education. Juno references the Old Testament story of Moses being placed in a basket and sent down the river as a baby while she’s discussing a closed adoption. She says she named her guitar after Franklin Roosevelt, “the hot one with the polio”. When Bateman says he’s a composer, Juno instantly thinks he’s like Johannes Brahms. She has an argument over who the better horror director was, Herschel Gordon Lewis or Dario Argento. These are just the tip of the iceberg on this pretentious dialogue. Sitting through the movie, I pictured the screenwriter as a 20-something psuedo-intellectual sitting in a local “fair trade” coffee shop wearing “ironic” clothing, having a horribly irritating conversation about politics, peppering their diatribe with misinterpreted and inappropriate quotes from DeToqueville’s Democracy In America.

Now, second of all, this movie was unrealistic. Partly due to the over-her-age-level dialogue, but also due to the fact that no one in the movie reacts like normal people would react to these situations. A 16 year old girl finds out she’s pregnant. She calmly calls an abortion clinic, but then chickens out of the operation and figures she’ll just have the baby and put it up for adoption. This whole decision making process takes 5 minutes in the movie. Never once do we really see any fear in the character. Then she tells her father and step-mother. Her father’s reaction? He cracks a joke that he didn’t think the boy who knocked up his daughter had it in him, which everyone else laughs at. Then he makes a snide remark that the next time he sees the boy, he’s going to punch him “in the weiner”. I’m sorry, but I’ve never known a father who would crack jokes when his baby girl who’s a junior in high school tells him she’s pregnant.

There were a few genuinely funny lines in the movie. The acting was mediocre. Michael Cera played Michael Cera and Jason Bateman played Jason Bateman. Seriously, they played their parts exactly as if they were filming another episode of Arrested Development. I half expected GOB to come sliding in on his Segway (”They’re illusions, Michael.”). Jennifer Garner seemed to be the only one in the whole movie who took her job halfway seriously, playing a truly believable woman who desperately wants to be a mother. Cinematography, editing, directing, etc., were all pretty standard. Nothing outstanding.

The fact that Diablo Cody has basically swept every “Best Screenplay” or “Best Screenwriter” award, including the Oscar, for this sub-standard script amazes me. With every passing year, it’s obvious that Hollywood is getting more and more out of touch with it’s audience. People who spend all their time in La-La Land must really think teenagers talk and act just like fictional Juno. Hollywood needs to stick to the stupid, CGI summer blockbusters that have no substance and leave the independent “feel good” movies to the people who know how to do them right. I’m sick of the psuedo-independent Hollywood movies. Little Miss Sunshine, Garden State, Akeelah And The Bee, etc. It’s sad that these are the “independent” movies that the majority of America is exposed to.

So, in conclusion, Juno sucked.