I just saw this movie, and I honestly can’t recall another movie with dialogue so stilted and scripted. The entire movie just masturbated to its own “cleverness” and forced quirkiness. No one on the face of the planet has ever talked like any of the characters in Juno. Just watching it made me simultaneously cringe in embarrassment and clench my fists in homicidal rage. Why in god’s name did this screenplay win an Oscar? I can vividly envision the writer sitting in her room trying to pen a canonical list of America’s next stupid catchphrases (“honest to blog!”), and then trying desperately to mash them together into some sassy and faux-poignant script. Oh, and hamburger phone. That’s really zany and endearingly idiosyncratic, bro.
In what world is a movie like this, as critics have pronounced it, “fresh”, “intelligent”, and “charming”? Did anyone else want to beat the personified version of this movie senseless with a 2x4?
I didn’t* hate it* hate it, but I hated it. NO 16-yr-old talks like that; she talked like a 30-yr-old screenwriter. The whole movie felt like it was specifically manufactured for the sole purpose of having Roger Ebert give it two thumbs up. Like the producers of Little Miss Sunshine handed that movie to a Hollywood studio and said, “Make this happen again.” It was so fake-indie, fake-Sundance, with its fake-lo-fi-faux-folky music. Bleeargh. One good thing: it make An American Crime a comedy.
I didn’t hate it. In fact, the first time I saw it I quite liked it. I thought the story itself was well constructed and the characters were interesting and all made very real choices. I don’t think it holds up particularly well, but that has more to do with the story being a bit simple than anything.
As to the dialogue, I don’t think it’s fair to knock the script for unrealistic dialogue, as realism clearly wasn’t the intention. The dialogue was stylized, and like the style or not, critisizing it for being non-realistic is a bit like critisizing a dog for not being a sea lion.
I know more teens who talk like that than old dudes who talk like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.
It was annoying, but I hated it way less than I thought I would.
Serious question. How can one tell the difference between well-done intentionally unrealistic dialogue and poorly done unintentionally unrealistic dialogue? I know nothing about screenwriting.
This is probably a stupid question, but did the yuppie woman have a job? Would the yuppie man have to pay child support?
Movies with heavily stylized dialogue:
2 Casablanca 1942
3 The Godfather 1972
4 Gone with the Wind 1939
5 Lawrence of Arabia 1962
6 The Wizard of Oz 1939
10 Singin’ in the Rain 1952
12 Sunset Boulevard 1950
14 Some Like It Hot 1959
15 Star Wars 1977
16 All About Eve 1950
23 The Maltese Falcon 1941
26 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 1964
30 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 1948
31 Annie Hall 1977
34 To Kill a Mockingbird 1962
35 It Happened One Night 1934
38 Double Indemnity 1944
40 North by Northwest 1959
41 West Side Story 1961
45 A Streetcar Named Desire 1951
46 A Clockwork Orange 1971
51 The Philadelphia Story 1940
55 The Sound of Music 1965
56 MAS*H 1970
65 The Silence of the Lambs 1991
66 Network 1976
68 An American in Paris 1951
71 Forrest Gump 1994
73 Wuthering Heights 1939
77 American Graffiti 1973
84 Fargo 1996
85 Duck Soup 1933
87 Frankenstein 1931
91 My Fair Lady 1964
93 The Apartment 1960
94 Goodfellas 1990
95 Pulp Fiction 1994
97 Bringing Up Baby 1938
100 Yankee Doodle Dandy
Not the same style as Juno, but stylized non the less. Like I said, just because you don’t like the style doesn’t mean that critiizing if for being stylized is fair.
I still haven’t watched it; judging from the marketing, it’s like the the writers specifically came up with the movie I would hate most.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
ETA: How is Pulp Fiction’s dialogue “heavily stylized”? It seems to me that cheeseburgers in France and mayonnaise on fries is more like what hitmen actually talk about that the dialogue in most movies.
Actually, I think it’s perfectly fair. I’m saying that good stylization-- some of which almost every movie adopts-- does not beats you over the head, telling you “HEY!!! NOTICE HOW FUCKING CLEVER I AM!!! NOTICE ME, GODDAMNIT!” I’ve seen a good number of the movies you’ve listed there, and few, if any, of them have done such a poor job of stylization as this movie. Perhaps I didn’t make this clear, but it’s not the stylization itself that is bothering me so much as the piss-poor job done of it. And there is little doubt in my mind that this is really fucking bad stylization.
You know people who talk like anyone in that movie? Hell, have you ever met anyone who speaks like ANYONE in any Quentin Tarantino movie?
I remember being positivly distracted by the dialogue the first time I saw one of his films. He’s almost as bad a Mammett.
ETA (and bring this back on topic.)
Ah, well that then is fair. Sorry, it’s a pet peeve of mine when people complain about the non-reality of things in film and television. I don’t disagree with you in terms of how she handled the dialogue, I wasn’t a fan. When I first saw it the stylization was limited mostly to the kids, so I figured she was doing a thing.
Then on subsequent viewings I noticed that it wasn’t really limited to the kids, just that the kids played it up and the adults played it down. I thought it worked better on the Gilmore Girls early seasons myself.
Again, why must you extrapolate a general law from a specific opinion in order to debate it? No one is formulating a general, inflexible law of movie dialog here; they’re expressing a specific reaction about a specific movie.
Stylized dialog is not of itself inherently a bad thing, and no one here has even come close to saying it is. (Do a random scan of previous of my own posts in many, many, MANY threads.) Nonetheless, the specific stylization of the dialog in Juno is the greatest of this movie’s many faults.
