Juno comes out on DVD on tax day (which is coming up, BTW), so it only makes sense that we finally went out to catch it in the theater this past weekend. One advantage of going to see a movie that's been playing for three months is that you don't have to worry about getting a good seat. As it turned out, we were the only two people in the theater for the showing that we attended.
There were a lot of things that I didn't like about this movie. I'll start of with the superficial - why were high schoolers listening to CDs and talking to each other on land line telephones? I was under the impression that everyone over the age of 13 has a cell phone and a lot of them might not know what a CD looks like. Moving on, I found most of the soundtrack unbearable. I didn't mind that all of the main characters were portrayed as a decent, likable human beings, but I thought that the movie had a surprising lack of conflict, especially considering the subject matter at hand. When conflicts did occur, they always seemed to resolve themselves off-camera and everything was back to normal by the time the characters appeared in another scene together.
I still enjoyed the movie, but it didn't really impress me the way it seems to have impressed a lot of people. I really felt like Michael Cera's character was underutilized, but maybe that was on purpose. Had he been more prominent, it would have made the movie into more of a standard teenage pregnancy story.
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4 comments:
Were you able to get past the fact that you were watching George Michael in something that wasn't Arrested Development?
Hodge, I didn't know you cared so much about realism is teenage preggers comedies. I would love to hear more about your experience with the "standard teenage pregnancy stor[ies]" that you reference in your post.
Motion seconded. Were you thinking of pregnancy vignettes from 9th grade health class?
With Michael Cera and Jason Bateman both playing major roles, Juno was about one Will Arnett cameo short of being an Arrested Development inside joke.
While I don't profess to be a connoisseur of the teenage pregnancy genre, it's a pretty common theme. What I was trying to say is that generally, movies like this force the viewers to take sides. The boyfriend is a good guy or a bum, the parents are supportive or they kick her out, etc. Juno doesn't really do that I think it's because it was so focused on Juno at the expense of the rest of the cast (including Michael Cera).
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