Valerie Tian and Ellen Page in Juno (dir. Jason Reitman, 2007).
All together now: aaaaawwwwwwwwwwwww.
But I don't care, I loved it. Ellen Page's wise waif Juno is not just perky/poignant/preggo, she's a necessary hero for the denizens of the disputed settlement between irony and whatever the fuck its opposite is purported to be.
I'm trying to remember if there's any other point in the movie, besides the part where she's sitting in the front yard in the guerilla-delivered living room set with her boyfriend and all the young guy athletes run by and she talks about "pork swords," where diegetic speech bleeds sneakily into voiceover: a neat trick, and a useful antidote to the problem thereof as it too often asserts itself in cinema.
The deleted-scenes feature on the DVD is of the rarer sort that is worth viewing. I understand why it was cut, on a couple of levels, but I must acknowledge the segment with the batty neighbor who responds to Juno's comment about a beautifully-colored sunset by saying that God loves all the colors--except Mexican. The laugh arrives with a smitten wince, and vice versa.
2 comments:
Thank you for liking this movie. As a non-backlasher I felt like I was alone, wrong, and bad. This is how I usually feel in poetryland, so at least I had the comfort of familiarity.
(Wait, you did like this movie, right?)
Alot of this movie is pretty good.
But I have this theory that if the kind of cuteness (and I'm not anti-irony whatever that even is) in this or any number of Wes Anderson films is the new "gratuitous violence", then the last scene in this, not to mention that Eagle vs Shark movie, are the equivalant of the last scene in The Wild Bunch. Like if you replaced the deluge of bloody mayhem with a deluge of adorable warm fuzzy cutenes, then the final scene in Juno is a cute-bath.
And I say this despite liking like 90 percent of it.
Maybe its not the best theory but its my theory. I've always wanted to have a theory.
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