Cody Hamman delivers some Film Appreciation for the Oscar-winning Juno.
While Juno started getting a rollout theatrical release in December of 2007, I know for a fact that I went to a theatre and saw the movie for the first time on January 5, 2008. I know this because I was keeping a blog on MySpace at the time, a blog that was supposed to chronicle my attempt to make my own movie but turned out to be a place where an emotionally troubled young man just spilled his guts for a couple years. I mentioned Juno in the January 5, 2008 entry because I had been blown away by the film's "quirkily stylized" dialogue, written by Diablo Cody (a pen name Brook Busey thought up while driving through Cody, Wyoming) - who had started out as a blogger. The characters in Juno speak their own specific brand of the English language, and I found it captivating to see how Cody was able to sustain that language throughout all of the dialogue exchanges.
This is a movie where one of the first lines is to a barking dog: "Jeez, Banana, shut your friggin' gob, okay?" Where a kid says "Wizard" instead of "Cool", where a character might say "Honest to blog", and there are lines like "Thanks a heap, coyote ugly. This cactus-gram stings even worse than your abandonment" and "This is one doodle that can't be un-did, home skillet." The characters speak in a way that I'm sure some viewers have found to be highly irritating, but I've always appreciated how unique it is, even if some of it may be a bit too much.
Juno started out as a writing sample that Cody was putting together to prove that she could write a screenplay based on her memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, a novel expansion of the blog she kept to chronicle her time working as a stripper. Written in a Starbucks inside a Target in small town Minnesota, the Juno script became Cody's first produced screenplay - and she even ended up winning an Oscar for it.
Directed by Jason Reitman, the film is an amusing and heartwarming story about a sixteen-year-old girl named Juno (Elliot Page), who discovers she's pregnant after a virginity-eliminating tryst with fellow high schooler Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) on a living room chair. Juno's first instinct is to "nip this in the bud" real quick, but she gets weirded out at the women's clinic (where the receptionist is played by Emily Perkins from Ginger Snaps) and decides she's going to take the adoption route. So we follow her through her pregnancy and see how she deals with it, and how the people around her deal with it. Paulie Bleeker, her best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby), her father Mac (J.K. Simmons) and stepmother Bren (Allison Janney).
She picks the couple she intends to give the baby to: Mark and Vanessa Loring, played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. At first, it looks like they're going to be somewhat uptight yuppies, but we get to know more about them as the film goes on. We see how emotional Vanessa is about the idea of being a mother, and it seems like she would be a very loving and caring mom. And we see that Mark doesn't have the same level of emotional maturity. Juno has fun hanging out with him, sharing music and movies, and Mark is the kind of guy who enjoys that a girl is showing him attention, regardless of who she is. Juno doesn't see the inappropriateness of their hang-out sessions, but Mark is aware and dives right in anyway.
As a horror fan, there's one particular scene that I both appreciate and find odd. When Juno finds a copy of The Wizard of Gore in Mark's collection, he tells her that the film's director Herschell Gordon Lewis is the "ultimate master of horror", to which Juno scoffs and says Dario Argento is the "ultimate master of horror". So Mark and Juno watch The Wizard of Gore together - which means this PG-13 movie that was nominated for Best Picture that year features a clip from an H.G. Lewis gore movie. While watching one of the gore set pieces, Juno turns to Mark and says, "This is even better than Suspiria!" Which is very weird, because The Wizard of Gore and Suspiria are such different movies, it's hard to imagine a horror fan directly comparing the two even if Lewis and Argento are both being discussed. I am more of a Lewis person than an Argento person, but I would never put The Wizard of Gore and Suspiria head-to-head. I do love that there's a Wizard of Gore clip in this movie, though.
The H.G. Lewis tribute is one of the things I remember most about this movie during the times between viewings. The other thing I remember most clearly is Page's delivery of the line Juno speaks in reaction Bren telling her that she's going to get weimaraners once Juno moves out (since Juno is allergic to dog saliva): "Whoa! Dream big!" You have to see it in context and hear the delivery to understand why that sticks with me.
Juno isn't a movie that I've watched a lot since January of 2008, but I am impressed by it every time I go back to it. It's well written and put together, has a great tone and style, and the cast turned in terrific performances. Cody absolutely deserved that Oscar win, and the movie also deserved its Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Page's performance, and Reitman's directing. It was an amazing year for Best Picture competition, two of the other nominees were Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood and the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men (which won), so it was quite an honor to be up there with those movies.
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