Juno
It does have a fairly impressive cast list with the exclusion of Micheal Cera who can only play roles where he’s really really awkward and quiet all the time. But he’s here to play an awkward teenage guy, so it fits perfectly!
Here is a movie that just repeatedly pulls your hair with it’s quirky-hipster-ness (because slapping you with quirky is way too mainstream and kids don’t do that anymore). Hell, these kids are so quirky they don’t use cell phones, instead opting for the obvious choice for any quirky-kid: a hamburger phone. They’re even too quirky to talk like… well, like anyone. Granted, I do like a few of Juno’s rants (the one about ‘sexually active’ is particularly good).
I like Ellen Page. I actually like a lot of the cast- I just don’t especially like the dialogue, which really hurts the film with how bad it is. But most of the cast members are able to outshine the roles they’ve been given.
Sure, the plot can be a bit swiss cheese-y at times; what with Juno’s parent’s acting so calm with her telling them of her pregnancy and plans to have the baby, despite her parent’s expressing how they’d rather she got expelled or into hard drugs than getting pregnant. And no, the movie isn’t explicit with her dealing with most of the physical issues that go with pregnancy; she very rarely pukes, waddles around without much complaint, and the rest is only mentioned in the hideously-written jokes she’ll spout off every now and again.
A lot of this movie’s popularity in 2007 (and boy, was it popular) seemed to come from it’s controversy (or, what people seemed to deem as controversies). How a fairly light indie coming-of-age movie came to be so damn controversial seems to mostly stem from its (not-so-obvious) unfortunate implications that no one could seem to agree on. A third the angry people seemed convinced that this movie was anti-feminist and pro-life because Juno decides against having an abortion under the (false) fact that the fetus has fingernails. The other side of the people claimed it was pro-choice (in that Juno does choose what to do) and feminist (with Juno being a smart, capable teenage girl who isn’t completely obsessed with having a boyfriend or going to prom or other behaviors Hollywood movies seem to think teenage girls obsess about).
Yet, to add one more controversy to the mix, some people claimed Juno glamorized teen pregnancy, making teenage girls want to get pregnant because… I don’t know. But as someone who was a 16-year-old girl when Juno came out, if you think I and my peers are that stupid as a collective whole, I’m much more worried about you than you are of me.
