April 20, 2008
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Juno the Capital of Alaska?
No, but I do know one more terrible awful no-good very bad script.
OK, guys, you all got me good. This has been the biggest practical joke pulled on me in my life, everyone getting me to sit down and watch Juno. I’m reminded of the time my family received a juicer for Christmas and one evening in February we decided to try it out. It made great apple juice and orange juice. We decided to try the veggies, starting with carrots. My brother thought the carrot juice looked absolutely disgusting. I drank a small glass and told him it was great. He didn’t believe me, so I drank another. That got him to taste it and discover that it was, as he suspected, downright nasty. It was absolutely worth it.
So, ha ha everyone. You got me to watch Juno. And not just a small taste of it; I made it a full 14 and a half minutes into the movie. I have to hand it to you; you had everyone in on this thing: my friends (even the ones with reasonably well-developed taste in movies), my bosses, the Academy–hell, even David Denby professed to like it.
Like I said, a hearty “good job” is in order for all of you. Karin, you can return that DVD you pretended you were adding to your collection; Oscar committee, you can redact the nominations; Cheryl and Tom, you can make a bona fide recommendation to me; David Denby, you can write your real review (I now know that when you wrote that the movie had “not a single false note,” you meant the exact opposite).
My review? It would be very short. “As a movie, Juno is a clusterfuck.”
Comments (7)
haha, really?? i’ve still yet to see it…
hmm.
“I made it a full 14 and a half minutes into the movie.” So really, we didn’t get you to watch Juno.
I’d like to hear more of your thoughts on it sometime. I liked it, but in the same way I liked the shrimp pasta I had at Carrabba’s tonight – I enjoyed it while it lasted, but it passed through me pretty quick.
I think it’s a shame. I really enjoyed this movie. Not to a point where I feel the need to own it, but I got a good laugh out of it. I’d be willing to bet that you went in to it with pretenses, whether conscious or not (kind of like how I’m trying with all my might to NOT feel about reading LOTR).
Sure, I wasn’t expecting to be blown away (or even impressed), but I did go in with an open mind. In fact, I kind of expected to be left with nothing to dislike about it. I figured I’d feel apathetic about it after watching it–like it wasn’t worth railing against.
But I’ve never started watching a movie and stopped fifteen minutes into it.
And Tebben, before returning the movie I found the script online and skipped ahead to the end, to see if the really annoying aspects of the storytelling and dialogue changed (I knew that the characters were going to transform). They didn’t. Maybe there are redeeming qualities (in fact, it sounds like there are). The story may be good, but I couldn’t stand the way it was told.
Man, I felt the same way about “No Country for Old Men”, but I might be alone in that. I think that “Juno” would have been a lot better if it had been written by Amy Sherman-Palladino and had Alexis Bledel in the lead role. Just watch an episode of “Gilmore Girls” and you’ll see what I mean. You probably still wouldn’t like the style, but you’d at least get to see it the way it was intented to be executed. Of course Sherman-Palladino’s latest effort has also been more than dissapointing (and I watched more than the pilot, well, fifteen minutes into the second show). I think it’s really just a difficult way to write and tell a story, and you have to find the right people for the galvanizing character roles otherwise you get crap.
I think I generally agree with you, Takunda (and I find Gilmore Girls entirely tolerable). It’s especially interesting that you point out that it’s a difficult way to (successfully) write, because I think that is simultaneously true with the fact that Diablo Cody exhibits easy and lazy writing in the script.
I think I found the movie extremely self-conscious, not subtle at all. Everything called attention to itself and its own cleverness–I couldn’t see the subtle and complete forest for the uber-quirky and faux-clever trees.
I agree, Juno didn’t have enough robots transforming into things.