February 2008 Archives
February 29, 2008
Your Source for Juno Hate
To my delight, my rant on Juno is now Google’s top choice for the following keywords:
i hate junoI’m also #2 for “hated juno” (damn you, Jim DeRogatis!) and #3 for “hating juno.” I tried some other keywords like “terrible,” “horrible,” “worst,” “embarrassing,” “awful,” and so on. Nothing, but who needs it? I have “hate” largely to myself.
i hated juno
hate juno (though, for some reason, I’m not even on page one for “juno hate”)
And what am I going to do with it? Gosh, I’d like to concoct some sort of Diablo Cody-esque attention-whore meltdown out of it, but being #1 on Google doesn’t exactly reach the epic proportions of taking a hip and edgy stand against wearing million-dollar shoes to the Oscars, even if you picked them out and were heavily involved in the design process. It barely even hits the level of publicly stating I’m going to leave town for self-reflection purposes, then staging photos with my #1 on Google statuette and turning where I’ve gone into a guessing game for rabid fans and hangers-on. I guess I don’t have the Diablo Cody spirit.
But I do have hate.
Also, I have this video link:
Posted by Stan on February 29, 2008 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews
February 28, 2008
Ethical Lapse?
One of the problems I found myself having as a reader (and continue to have, even in my non-official capacity as “guy who reads things”) was probably the most basic for a writer: everything I read, I knew how to make better. It didn’t help that when I read for The Manager, he had both general submissions and a “client” roster of awful, awful writers with very good ideas.
Knowing how to improve a story is actually helpful because, rather than just dumping all over a shitty script, you can hone in on the potential goodness and tailor your suggestions that way. I tried not to be the kind of guy who would look at something and say, “Here’s how I’d do it,” so I’d try to look at things as objectively as possible: what’s the story they’re trying to tell, where does it go wrong, why does it go wrong? It helped that many of these screenplays suffered from what I’ll call “objective badness,” plundering such depths of crappiness that any person with basic reading comprehension would know it’s bad. They may not know how or why they feel that way, but they know it with every fiber of their beings.
It turns into a problem when you find a script that is loaded with so many good ideas — but is so poorly executed — that giving feedback isn’t enough. You want to just swipe that idea and make it your own, to do it the justice it deserves.
It’s what we in the biz call “plagiarism.”
It’s something I’ve never done, but it’s a slippery ethical question. Everyone has good ideas. They’re the easy part. But if you’re lifting an idea you’d never have on your own, with the sole intention of making it better so it won’t get tossed into the rejection pile*, how does that shake out? Even though you know it’s wrong, it’s for the betterment of mankind. And besides, nobody but a bottom-feeding reader at a bargain-basement company, making little to know money, will ever set his or her eyes on it. So if you can get it to that point where maybe somebody, somewhere will want to look at it — is that wrong?
Yes, it is.
Which is the only thing preventing me from stealing one of the best bad ideas I’ve ever read, a really interesting take on the zombie genre. It has one of the worst third acts in any script I’ve ever read (worse than the one where the main character’s death is the act-break turning point, and the last 30 pages are specified to be “shaky digital video” of scripted remembrances of a character we barely cared about, all coming from characters we’ve never met before and will never see again), but it has so many good ideas and is such a fresh take on a mostly retarded genre that I want to swipe it, make it as good as I can, and add it to my portfolio of hacky garbage.
I don’t write horror. I could never come up with a good concept, and every time I think the genre’s an endless parade of shitty sequels and remakes, some gem proves me wrong (that is my subtle recommendation for you to all see Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, one of 2007’s best films). When I read the zombie script, I had one of those great moments where I thought, “Wow, I wish I’d written that.” Then I had the more distasteful afterthought: “Well, not written that, but something with that ingenious setup and…everything else done differently.”
So does that constitute plagiarism? It’s like any kind of nerdy writer game: you start with the same premise to see what kinds of different takes each writer could get from the same approximate starting point. If I take the very basic elements of it but change everything else, that’s not theft…right?
Maybe not legally, but there’s still the ethics. And the potential guilt. And I was raised Catholic, so…
But I still think about this idea. It’s one of those things that just won’t leave my mind — it’s that good.
So about a week ago, Lucy begged me to let her in on the new screenplay I had worked so diligently on. It’s actually a rewrite of an old favorite I was doing to impress a Medium-Shot Producer, so I could present it to him once the dust of the strike had settled. To my surprise, she was interested enough in it to read it. She’s said that before, and usually she…doesn’t. This time, though, she not only took the time to read it — she made me sit on Instant Messenger while she read it, allowing me to get the feedback in real time. It led to a few amusing instances like:
(13:17:29) Lucy: [Goofy plot point] doesn’t make any sense.
(13:22:40) Lucy: Oh.
Granted, that helps me. As an “audience member” for the screenplay, hearing her pure reactions to what was happening — like getting confused, even if something makes sense later — makes me reevaluate when, exactly certain moments need to happen to avoid audience frustration. What I’m writing here are “selling drafts,” and it’s hard to get shit sold if you have a producer or a lowly reader (each of whom read scripts fast and not too carefully) getting annoyed because the story takes its time before it starts making sense. Of course, it’s also difficult to write conspiracy thrillers where you know the entire conspiracy upfront, but hey…making somebody else happy while making myself happy is a good challenge. One I often fail at (search for “The Ex” for evidence).
At some point during the feedback process, I don’t remember how, Lucy got me started on the zombie screenplay. I told her all about it and how awesome the idea was but how botched the execution was and how I’d do it differently because I am a fucking king while the writer who did the script is a tool. Then she said something kind of amazing:
“The setup for the movie sounds really familiar. I think he ripped it off.”
“From what?” I asked.
“I don’t remember.”
Last night, at 2:39 a.m., she did, and she text-messaged it to me: “That’s it! Ghosts of mars. Movie that entities enter people but go into someone else if the host is killed and the one chick beats it cuz she takes drugs.”
There are two minor differences between the script idea I wanted to steal and Lucy’s synopsis of Ghosts of Mars, which led me to check the movie out. I can definitively say that, yes, it has similar enough ideas for me to assume the script I read was probably ripped off from Ghosts of Mars (and probably why the ideas were so above-average while the execution was not — not to say Ghosts of Mars is a great movie, but it’s good enough).
Which leads to my final ethical question: is it wrong to knowingly rip off a shitty script that rips off a halfway-decent movie, even if you plan to deviate so far from its shady origins that it’d be unrecognizable to the sham screenwriter and/or John Carpenter?
That’s a question I can’t answer.
(Unless choosing to keep working on my own ideas while talking idly about someone else’s counts as an answer.)
*Not that I, personally, have the ability to get my shit past the rejection pile.
Posted by Stan on February 28, 2008 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling
February 24, 2008
Dull the Hate
I’m not going to lie and say I don’t hate things, because anybody who’s taken even a cursory look at that blog would burst into either laughter or tears (both?) at such an outrageous lie. My recent outburst against the movie Juno might look, on the surface, like a hateful diatribe. I mean, the post has the word “hate” in the title, right?
I did hate Juno. After initially feeling indifferent-yet-positive, closer inspection revealed an aimless story and a protagonist who grew more unlikable the more you learned about her (and she didn’t start out terribly likable in the first place). My real objection, if you cut through the rage, is that it blew a shitload of raw potential on a movie that’s kinda crappy. Making a film is a difficult, expensive process, so why spend the time and money on something that isn’t the absolute best you can make it? Sometimes, it’s just a matter of a weak link; sometimes, it’s a big-ass weak chain.
You might think, based on my review, that the weak link in the film is Diablo Cody and/or her screenplay. Granted, it’s all kinds of bad, but it has so many moments of raw potential that could have been good if, as I suggested, it had undergone a few more rewrites (preferably with a different writer). It had all the elements of a great story, then blew it on an unstructured mess of painful dialogue and cloying sentiment. She missed two great opportunities: (1) pregnancy is hard, especially for teenagers, and (2) there’s so much wonderful irony in the idea of an obnoxious expectant mother inadvertently destroying the marriage of her unborn child’s surrogates.
I’m not saying they had to take it in a pedo direction with Mark and Juno — in fact, I thought what was there was already uncomfortable and unnecessary enough. They just needed to see the storyline through and make it even more destructive and difficult. This would have given Juno her much-needed comeuppance, it would have fleshed out Mark and Vanessa’s ill-defined relationship satisfactorily, and it would have caused all three of these characters to grow and change in interesting ways. As it stands, the divorce is a bump in the road, and both Mark and Vanessa are largely ignored after their dull discussion of it. And yes, I believe they could accomplish all of this while maintaining a sense of humor.
Believe it or not, I didn’t want to turn this into another rant on Juno. I’m just trying to illustrate the untapped potential of that screenplay, which either nobody noticed or nobody cared enough about.
This brings me back to the weak chain. Diablo Cody’s screenplay could have been great if she hadn’t wussed out at every opportunity to make these characters truly come alive with genuine dramatic conflict, which might make you think she’s the weak link. Seems reasonable…
…and yet, people bought this screenplay. People put it through the development wringer (which, contrary to popular opinion, doesn’t always ruin a movie). A great cast and a novice director who made one great movie signed on to it. To hear all of them tell it, this screenplay is the greatest thing in the history of time. I can see certain admirable qualities in the screenplay — including superficial qualities that might appeal to actors, directors, and producers (such as the acting challenge of spewing out that atrocious dialogue, or the “edgy” subject matter) — but at the end of the day, the good doesn’t outweigh the bad. The good doesn’t justify the bad, doesn’t make you ignore the bad, doesn’t redeem a bad movie. There’s just not enough of it, and what is there isn’t good enough.
So I don’t hate everything. I just get disappointed. And then I hate the thing for not living up to standards that, frankly, I don’t think are very high. (Case in point: I watched Point Break this morning. Point fucking Break, a movie I haven’t seen in a few years…and it’s just unbelievably good. Even the ending, which I sorta hated at first because it felt like the studio-imposed “three endings to make sure the broadest group of idiots leaves happy,” started to work for me this time around. So no, I do not have high standards. I just have standards.)
I saw Gone Baby Gone and No Country for Old Men in the same week that I saw Juno. The latter is great, about as good a Coen Brothers movie that’s ever been made (and that’s saying something), but the former was — dare I say it? — a masterpiece. No, “masterpiece” might be too strong, but it’s easily the best movie I’ve seen in a year (not just including movies made within the last year). If anybody wants a lesson in how to do crime thrillers or modern noirs — and based on Hollywood’s output, they need a lesson — Gone Baby Gone is the movie they should start with. Great, economic storytelling, great cast, the best use of cinematic misdirection since Marathon Man.
Why didn’t I write about these movies? Because this blog exists to get the rage out. I like feeling happy; I don’t like feeling rage and distress. One could argue that my lack of posting means I’m happy. I have an ulcer that would suggest otherwise; in fact, maybe that ulcer is saying, “Post more.”
And maybe I will…
…but first! I’ve noticed more than a dozen (which is a lot for this blog) searches for Pan’s Labyrinth and Garden State since I posted the Juno review (which contains a barbed reference to each of those movies). I never reviewed them because, frankly, neither one disappointed or annoyed me. They were awful, but they didn’t spark the rage.
Theoretically, they should have, because of the hype surrounding each. I had been told by many that Garden State is the defining movie of our generation. If it is: wow, what a boring, disaffected generation. At the same time, many of the rugged, manly men I carouse with broke down just before last call and whispered through their tears that Pan’s Labyrinth is the only movie that truly made them weep, and they loved every minute of it. Really?
So here’s a generalized assessment of each:
Garden State — I don’t have much to say except that, in a much less irritating way than Juno (but still kind of annoying), it tried way too hard to find deep meaning in largely meaningless words and actions. On top of which, the pacing was a bit ponderous. Yes, I know this was to underscore the malaise of the characters, but fuck, why would I want to watch a movie about listless people that’s boring as shit? Kevin Smith made Clerks, tackling similar themes about the same age bracket, and managed to make the tedium and malaise snappy and entertaining. (And before you get mad at me for defending Kevin Smith, who is essentially the male Diablo Cody: Clerks is still a good movie. It and the insane animated series spinoff are the only things Kevin Smith is associated with that I still enjoy. I used to be a fanboy; then I stopped being 15. It’s juvenile, but the jokes still work, and its depth and understanding of the sad-sack characters holds up better than the treacly sentiment of his later movies.)
Pan’s Labyrinth — Okay, so Sergi López plays creepy like nobody’s business. So the fuck what? The problem here is the fantasy element. I’m all for magical realism, but this is what Jay Sherman would call “fantacrap.” So you have a little girl. She has a shitty life. She escapes into a fantasy world that’s actually about 1000 times more disturbing than her actual life, but for some reason she has a strong desire to keep escaping to this world, without the movie giving us any firm understanding of why she would (other than the shittiness of her life). At the end, she’s killed and escapes permanently into the fantasy world. I was almost on board with the movie until this point, where all the subtle, disturbing imagery suddenly turned beat-you-over-the-head obvious as the little girl is hailed the queen of this goofy alternate world and can finally be happy in death. Duh! I might have actually been okay with the movie — though not nearly as positive as everyone else on the planet — if Guillermo del Toro hadn’t gone the Jane Campion route of explaining to us how deep his movie is like we’re third-graders. Either be deep or confusing as shit and let us sort it out (like David Lynch), or make a normal movie for the unwashed masses. You can’t have it both ways.
Huh, I guess Pan’s Labyrinth did sort of get the rage going. I should blog more.
Posted by Stan on February 24, 2008 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
February 18, 2008
Easy to Hate: Juno
With the critical accolades, awards nominations (and wins), boffo box-office, a can’t-lose premise, and a fine ensemble directed by the man who made 2005’s best movie (Thank You for Smoking), I don’t think I was looking forward to anything more than Juno. I even had usually reliable friends raving about this thing. One said, “It’s the rare movie where you can believe every good thing said about it.” He hates everything, so it didn’t even seem as much like quote-whoring as it looks there, nakedly in print. He acted astonished and impressed, and I decided, “I must see this movie.” Unfortunately, laziness prevailed, so I didn’t bother to see it until two weeks ago…
…and then I nearly walked out before the first scene gave way to the opening credits. The only thing that kept me there, aside from hardly earned money that could no longer be refunded, was all the external goodwill this movie had built up. But right off the bat, my first thought: “This is some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard.” Seems like as good a place as any to start.
The Dialogue, Part I: One Doodle that Can’t Be Undid, Homeskillet
Don’t think I have a problem with stylized, hyper-real dialogue. If you ignore Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, his liberal grandstanding, and the last 15 minutes of Charlie Wilson’s War, a sound argument could be made that Aaron Sorkin writes some of the most interesting, vivid, and poetic dialogue of anybody working today. David Mamet is great when he’s not being a misogynist. Even Paul Thomas Anderson writes some great dialogue. He hasn’t yet mastered third acts or matching “quirky” with “plausible,”* but his dialogue consistently comes in second place (after cinematography) on the list of good things about his movies.
Read this and tell me Juno doesn’t contain some of the worst dialogue in cinematic history: “That ain’t no Etch-a-Sketch. This is one doodle that can’t be undid, homeskillet.” Marvel at that. If you’ve seen the movie, you’re probably remembering Rainn Wilson’s baffling cartoon-character delivery of the line. You’re probably remembering the horrible attempt to throw us “in the moment” with a frenetic opening scene that doesn’t match anything else in the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie, you’re probably wondering what sort of alien language Diablo Cody has chosen for her movie.
Let me tell you: the language in Juno is like that one kid in junior high who’s an outcast, always ridiculed for his utter lack of coolness. So he monitors how the “cool kids” act, what they’re into, what they’re wearing, and he goes out and buys some too-tight acid-washed jeans and has his mom cut holes in them and run them through the dryer 40 times, a leather Members Only jacket, a Ramones t-shirt, a pair of classy gold-rimmed aviator glasses, a bandanna, and a Raw Punk Classix Vol. 1 tape. Then he comes to school on Monday, and he’s ridiculed for trying so fucking hard to be hip and cool, to transform himself from the outcast with the periodic table of elements t-shirt to the badass who shoves sticks into dead squirrels in the woods behind the public library.
There’s a nearly imperceptible line between being just cool enough and trying so hard you embarrass yourself. Diablo Cody’s dialogue goes so far past that line you can’t see it on the horizon, creating a screenplay that wants to be quotable but is so loaded with unnecessary verbiage and trying-hard-to-be-obscure-without-being-in-any-way-obscure pop culture references that it’s almost as unquotable as this blog. Can’t people just talk? Why try to force it by making everything so florid and rhymey and alliterative and just plain unnatural?
There’s an inherent musicality in natural conversation, even conversation riddled with pop culture references, a la Kevin Smith. Diablo Cody doesn’t have enough confidence in her story or characters (not even flawless Juno) to just let the people talk. Every line has to sound like Kerouac on mushrooms. If this had been done in a clever attempt to show that Juno herself masks crippling self-doubt, the horrible dialogue would have been justified. Juno can’t have self-doubt, though; she’s perfect. Also, the fact that every character who isn’t Vanessa sounds exactly like Juno just points to lazy/awful writing. Nothing clever here.
The Dialogue, Part II: Thundercats Are Go!
I would have cut this movie so much slack if it had been set in 1995 instead of 2007. It would still have awful dialogue, but at least it wouldn’t destroy what little credibility it has by making references a 2007 16-year-old would never, ever say, probably never even know.
Let’s start with the stupidest and most obvious: “Thundercats are go!” Aside from trying way too hard to be “wacky” and “clever” (which I will dive into more when I discuss the character of Juno), would any kid born after 1990 know or care about Thundercats? Would they go the extra mile to combine it with a Thunderbirds reference? Would their parents have a clue what they were talking about? Have they even played reruns of Thundercats since it went off the air? I could see a kid born 10 years earlier knowing and making this reference. (And yes, I know plans were recently announced to both relaunch a Thundercats animated series and created a CGI film. I know far, far too much about this, so all you Juno lovers better not jump my shit about this. They are turning the animated series into some kind of Barbie and the Rockers/Hannah Montana shit stain and using the movie, like Transformers, to cram nostalgia down the throats of idiots my age. One is too young for your average teenager, one is too old, and the fact remains that neither are out yet.)
The bit about Juno wanting to watch Blair Witch Project because she “hadn’t seen it since it came out.” Do the math. She would have been seven or eight when that movie came out. Despite her pointless name-checking of Dario Argento, I can’t imagine Juno’s parents (portrayed as always having her best interests in mind) taking her — or allowing someone 17 or older to take her — to see Blair Witch. So what the fuck? If you wrote the screenplay in 2001 and have been hustling it for five years, the least you could do is update the reference so it makes some kind of sense.
The Bone Collector/Morgan Freeman thing. HE WASN’T EVEN IN THE MOVIE. I’ve read a few fans of the movie decry this nitpick by saying it’s a “subtle” way of pointing out Juno doesn’t know everything. Except that contradicts…pretty much everything else that’s established regarding Juno’s character. It’s just a sloppy error, almost like…
The story behind the name “Juno.” Which we never needed to know, for one thing. I hate it when movies think the names of their characters are so clever, unique, interesting, and/or symbolic that it requires a pseudo-poignant scene explaining where the name came from. Fuck you. The only person dumb enough to name a kid “Juno MacGuff” is a screenwriter. But that’s not the point. The point is:
JUNO IS A ROMAN GODDESS. NOT GREEK. You’d think a father so obsessed with Greek mythology would have picked up on that. Or a screenwriter with access to Google. It’s such an easy fucking fix: change his fixation to Roman mythology, or name her Hera MacGuff. The end. A half-second of “find-and-replace” would have made this scene 100% less retarded. It disappoints me not only that Diablo Cody apparently did not know this, but that nobody in the cast or crew felt the need to take three seconds and look it up. Shit, I haven’t even thought about ancient myths since sixth grade, and I knew off the top of my head that Juno was Roman. I couldn’t have told you her backstory or the name of her Greek doppelganger (until I took five seconds to look it up) — but I knew she wasn’t Greek.
There are other annoying references that a 2007 16-year-old would be unlikely to know or care about, but these were the three that bugged me the most.
And while this should maybe fall under the category of “story,” my most hated part of the movie has more to do with the lazy voiceover than with the story per se: “It started with a chair”/”It ended with a chair.” Has there ever been a lamer attempt to bookend a story? Christ, it almost makes “he was good in chair” sound urbane and witty. I’m sure I will delve more into “the chair” later, when I explore the story problems. But before I get there…
The Characters
I will say this: Juno MacGuff is the single most obnoxious lead character to appear in a film in a decade. The last truly embarrassing protagonist I can remember is Adam Sandler in The Waterboy (a movie I found funny, but Sandler’s horrible mushmouth accent almost sunk the whole thing). Her main flaw — get ready to embrace the irony — is that the screenplay would have us believe she’s flawless. Juno is portrayed as the smartest, cleverest, bestest person around. We get a lot of furtive glances and uncomfortable moments from other characters, but they amount to the movie telling us: Juno is so cool, so fresh, so original that these squares and old fogies just don’t understand her uniqueness. Never fear, though. They will be won over by her plucky charm, while she will remain an unchanged testament to perfection.
I’d like to compare her to Enid from Ghost World. That’s another character who is obnoxious and self-absorbed in similar ways, though not nearly to the extent of Juno. The difference is, throughout Ghost World, every single character gives her at least a small amount of shit for acting so obnoxious, and by the end of the movie she decides to grow the fuck up. No such luck with Juno; she is untouchable, and I wish the movie had portrayed her as simply delusional, while everyone around her is just waiting for the day that she snaps out of it and stops acting like a douchebag. Instead, they try to make us buy into Juno as an ideal person.
There are two moments that approach honesty — when Mark calls Juno out on “not being alive” during her chosen “best time for music” (after she stupidly argues, “You had to be there”), and when Paulie Bleeker confesses he tries really hard to be cool. I just wish moments like these were enough to make Juno pause for a bit of self-examination. But hey, who needs to take a step back and reevaluate perfection? There’s nothing she could do to become more perfect, right? …right.
Meanwhile, with the exception of Olivia Thirlby’s overcaffeinated performance as Leah, did every other actor in the movie ingest massive quantities of barbiturates in preparation for the movie? These characters don’t react to anything!
I know it’s supposed to be somewhat funny and ironic that Juno’s dad and stepmom are supportive of the pregnancy, but it just comes across as lazily copping out in the face of truly interesting conflict. Same deal with another pivotal moment: Mark and Vanessa’s divorce. It’s so laconic, it barely exists as a plot point. I’m not asking for screaming matches and hair-pulling (it’s supposed to be a comedy, after all), but this is one of the rare dramatic works that backs away from conflict and interesting character and story development — the fundamentals of dramatic structure — in favor of dropping a few more references to punk bands so obscure, they have greatest hits CDs.
The Story
Full disclosure: when the lights first came up, I said to myself, “Well, I hated the first hour, but it really redeemed itself in the last 30 minutes.” In fact, in thinking so hard about (a) how I could hate two-thirds of a movie but decide the final third was enough to redeem the remainder and (b) why I disliked significant chunks of a movie that seems universally loved, I came around to officially hating it. Because what I liked about the third act does not hold up under close examination. At all.
I will deal with the third act specifically in a minute, but first, the main problem with the whole movie: it has no idea what its story is. Structurally, it couldn’t prop up an empty thimble without breaking apart. It pretends to know what it’s about: a teenager who is unexpectedly impregnated and decides to keep the baby. A winning premise given the most irresponsible and reckless treatment of any movie tackling a taboo subject. “Hey, teen girls living in a world where the pregnancy rate increases exponentially on a weekly basis: you can carry the baby to term and sell it off to a yuppie couple with no physical or emotional consequences. No muss, no fuss.” Good call, movie! I’m glad so many people are seeing you, because that’s really a message that needs to be delivered to the masses.
Whether a great idea in theory or a shallow movie in practice, it doesn’t matter. The narrative doesn’t stick with the premise. Maybe that’s why they tacked on “the chair” bookends. “Gee, they brought up a chair at the beginning and then again at the end, so I guess this is a complete story.” The chair becomes symbolic of everything that’s wrong with the movie: an impossible-to-believe protagonist coupled with lazy attempts to hold the story on a steady course it doesn’t want to go down. It also speaks to the complete non-effect the pregnancy has on her, physically and emotionally. She was only two months pregnant at the time, but seriously? Moving a bunch of furniture from a house to a front lawn? By herself? That can’t be healthy.
Now, the chair annoyed me, but I did initially buy into the story, meandering as it was. And there’s one reason for that: the last five minutes. These precious minutes contain two rare moments of emotional honesty. Nothing in Juno is more effective than Jennifer Garner’s performance as Vanessa, and those last few moments pack a nice emotional punch. I bought into that almost as fully as I bought into Bleeker quietly comforting Juno in the hospital. Then they sang a horrible song and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Bleeker comforting Juno, and their little song at the end, and the joviality expressed in the very last scene, as she happily rides her bike to her man, are actually reminders of why the story doesn’t work.
Again, it’s a problem with Cody pulling punches and losing the real truth and intrigue of the piece. As soon as we’re introduced to the Lorings, the entire movie becomes a different animal. The more Juno inserts herself into their lives (or, at least, Mark’s), the more interesting it becomes.
It all goes off the rails in the third act, though. First, Juno’s pseudo-pining for Bleeker, and their reconciliation, shows how one-sided and potentially disastrous their relationship is. We’re supposed to think Juno’s flawless, but when they got together and Juno declared her love for him, I immediately felt very, very sorry for him. Because she’s obnoxious and bossy and, for the most part, looks down on Bleeker. You could make arguments for different levels of emotional complexity in the characters, but to me I read her purest motivation as: her entire life has spiraled out of control, so she chose to regain that control by forging a relationship where she can boss a sweet kid around.
It’s around this point that the movie stops being about getting TEEN PREGNANT and the potential problems of getting a bit too close to the surrogate parents. It turns into a CW teen soap, and not a very good one. Consequently, we get no resolution to the real story. Yes, Vanessa gets her baby. Yes, she and Mark get divorced. Yes, one can infer Juno never sees either of them again. So where’s all the emotional fallout? The third act turning point — the divorce — should have given us so much insight into these three characters, who are the true centerpiece of the movie, but once again Cody wimps out and tries to convince us that, hey, these characters we’ve spent half an hour with don’t matter much anymore.
The third act mostly sticks a big, pointy knife into the second act, so what was the point of Vanessa and Mark? Why make us care about them and their story and then not see it through to the end? (Vanessa, alone, receiving the baby does not qualify as a satisfying resolution to their story, emotionally honest or not.)
The Direction
Much of my criticism has been focused on the screenplay, because it’s fucking terrible.
Sadly, I can’t let Jason Reitman off the hook. After directing Thank You for Smoking, the most stylistically vibrant comedy since Election, what happened? Did he look at a bunch of Wes Anderson movies and get all the wrong ideas? I admire him for attempting something so different in style, but I don’t admire him for doing it poorly. I just don’t understand how the direction here could be so flat and dull, from the non-reactive supporting characters to the inert story. Because of my love of Thank You for Smoking and its pitch-black merry-prankster vibe, I wish I could believe Reitman directed this movie as a practical joke, that he hated the screenplay and wanted to satirize the entire “quirky” “independent” “comedy” movement.
Unfortunately, the movie is a little too sincere at the end for me to believe it. (Also, there’s the practical question of why a hot director would waste his time and potentially sabotage his career by making something intentionally terrible. But hey, a true merry prankster doesn’t think through shit like that. Trust me.)
The Soundtrack
I can partly blame Reitman-cum-Anderson for this. Also Ellen Page, who apparently had input on much of the soundtrack. Despite the fact that there’s textual evidence that Juno would hate the kind of music played throughout the movie, Page has insisted she made the selections believing it’s the kind of music Juno would listen to. Seriously, though, can we declare a moratorium on whiny, half-sung/half-spoken acoustic indie music in indie movies? I know these movies are usually done on the cheap, but I think you can afford to clear some music by people who know how to tune/play their instruments.
Am I asking too much?
The Bottom Line
What does Juno need to cross that line into normal. not-trying-too-hard coolness? Self-awareness. Juno the character is as flawed as her eponymous film. If the pregnancy experience caused her to learn something about herself or the people around her and grow as a human being, or if more of the characters made pointed references to her immaturity and obnoxiousness, and it caused Juno to take a few steps and realize hey, she’s 16 and pregnant. Even if she’s giving the baby away, maybe it’s time to grow up. (I don’t qualify her easy-way-out “love” for Bleeker as “growing up” or doing any kind of difficult soul-searching. It’s as random as one of Juno’s pop culture references.) Instead, everything goes right back to normal. Nothing about her experience changes Juno at all. Why did we watch this movie? The premise and the parts of the story that work indicate that, with several rewrites (and probably a different screenwriter altogether, maybe even a different director), Juno could have been a wonderful film. Instead, it’s a disappointing mess.
I’m going to go ahead and declare this the most overrated film of 2007. All the accolades, good reviews, and boffo box-office have baffled the shit out of me. I can’t see what everyone else sees, even though I wanted to like it. I’m just glad, after thinking about it too long and too hard, I can articulate my rage semi-coherently. Since nearly everybody I know loves the shit out of it, it’s nice to lay out all of the problems with it so I can ruin their day. To me, it’s 2007’s Pan’s Labyrinth or Garden State: I hate it deeply and specifically, and everybody hates me for not only my dislike, but my ability to explain in blunt (but detailed) terms why I feel that way.
At the very least, I think the cast should win some sort of special award for making that alien language of Diablo Cody’s sound like words actual humans would say.
If you read through this and said, “This fucking guy — he’s just jealous of Diablo Cody,” I say to you:
YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT. I AM. Good God, I wish I could hatch a calculated scheme to take a stripper job solely to get a book deal out of it, then use my status as a 10th-tier “journalist” to hustle a screenplay written largely in the same style and largely about the same person (face it: Juno MacGuff is either Diablo Cody or the person Cody wishes she could have been at 16), adding some minor taboo subjects to make it “edgy” and “interesting,” and then have that screenplay propel me to an A-list writer nominated for a shit-ton of awards. Yes, I am jealous. She is the kind of hack I want to be.
*Note: I haven’t seen There Will Be Blood yet, so maybe he has.
Posted by Stan on February 18, 2008 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (27) | Classic Issues, Reviews
