Right before that, I wrote
So I think it was pretty obvious I was stating my opinion and not pretending it was a fact.
For an alleged TA you could really use some work on reading comprehension. I said there’s a reason for it being popular, not that being popular in and of itself means it has to be good.
It seems like the problem is really that you’re far too enamored with yourself to understand that things can be good even without your stamp of approval.
So you’re one up on Cagey Drifter anyway.
Ditto this. It was ludicrous.
-FrL-
I’m not sure if I posted in any Juno threads when the movie was released but overall I thought it was a cute movie on first viewing. I generally liked the characters, JK Simmons was funny and seemed to pull of his dialogue better than most. Juno and her friend’s dialogue is pretty tough to get over at times, though.
I read somewhere (a famous movie guy said it) that dialogue should be what a character would say in an ideal world. To me, that means the dialogue that is in your head when you fantasize asking out a girl (or guy) you like. It isn’t made up nonsense that you hope will garner a laugh. Phrases like, “Honest to blog” and “desperately seeking spawn” are the latter and take one out of the scene as oppose to adding to it. They are examples of phrases that Diablo Cody THOUGHT were cute and clever and were hoping would inject themselves into popular culture but in the end just come off as silly. The movie is filled with them and it’s really tiresome.
Jeez, relax. First of all, I think we’d all appreciate it if you didn’t get personally offended by the fact that some of us hated this shitty movie.
Second, it was actually you who was trying to discount our opinions, using facts to do it (‘there’s a reason why its popular’). I don’t care if it’s popular. The fact that it’s popular doesn’t mean I have to like it; you seemed to be arguing that those of us who don’t like it don’t have that right or are somehow wrong in our opinions because it’s popular. I will say that I believe anyone with good taste (a subjective construct) will generally find themselves steering clear of popular movies and music. Not because they’re popular, but because most of it is really fucking bad, this movie included.
Third, things can’t be good without our own stamp of approval, at least if you subscribe to your own argument about how art is relativistic, and in the eye of the beholder.
Fourth, you are arguing against straw men. I never said it was objectively bad. Obviously, there is no such thing in art. I said I found the movie forced and fake. If you want to watch this movie 400 times on repeat with your friends, I couldn’t give a good god damn, really.
I found Cera’s character utterly unappealing. He knocks her up so passively he’s hardly even there; he melts away; he drifts after another girl while Juno’s pregnant; Juno decides he’s a really cool person after all; he shows up briefly at the hospital; then the baby disappears and they’re happy boyfriend and girlfriend again.
I found it totally unrealistic that Juno would find him attractive at all, let alone that she would go back to him and they would live happily ever after like the pregnancy never happened.
I thought it was OK, and my niece actually sounds a lot like Ellen Page’s character.
This movie reminded me of Winona Ryder in Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael. Not the same situation, but the same kind of maturity thing.
Yup. This was what I struggled with (as much as I struggled with anything re this film. It’s a movie, folks. It’s not supposed to perfectly encapsulate teenhood or modern life today or whatever). I find it impossible to believe that whatever his name was would have been in any way attractive to any HS girl. That’s part of the joke and all, but it falls flat. Then again, my (then) HS daughter did say she thought he was cute (but now that she’s in college, she disdains the film. <shrugs> Kids today! 
I will say that I found the dialogue funny, and if taken as Juno’s thoughts and memories of what happened to her, it makes more sense. I got the sense that as narrator, she was half remembering scenes from this time in her life and half reading aloud a journal or memoir of this time. It’s not demonstrated (the reading from part) as such in the film, but I think interpreting this way works. My favorite lines are Juno’s “Out dealing with things way beyond my maturity level” and “I really don’t know what kind of girl I am”, both to her father. They ring very true to teen girls (and guys)–but most lack the guts to say it (or the insight to know it).
“Breaking Away” is another teen film that had tons of witty dialogue and I do remember talking like they did-not all the time, not as consistently, but we did have those catch phrases and “ironic” allusions etc. See also “Mean Girls” and “Saved”.
Forgot to add: I didn’t see the WomanNow place as a “diss” to Planned Parenthood at all. Having been in health care for quite some time, I can easily believe that some tech (or nurse or doc) with an agenda could and would say something like that. I have a friend who had her (then) teen daughter in counseling for various issues and sex came up. My friend stated that she believed in premarital sex (when the person could handle it–she wasn’t advocating 14 year olds doing the nasty etc) and the counselor told her she should reconsider her belief.
We all know the counselor was out of line, but the point is that this kind of thing happens all the time in health care. It shouldn’t; it’s wrong, but it does. I highly doubt it would happen at PP, but that ultrasound tech in the movie was out of line.
Funny enough, that’s exactly what I think of the majority of Whedon’s body of work, and I loved Juno. (And Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, FWIW.)
If someone in a movie says it, it’s dialogue. That’s what this particular iteration of the word “dialogue” means. You can’t just chop away dialogue until you get down to the one half-scene that you care to present as evidence.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
Yeah, yeah, sure. But come on, it’s a personality quirk that he says this, not an overall dialogue thing.
Literally every movie ever made was like that. Ever watched Gone With the Wind, 12 Angry Men, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, King Kong, or the Wizard of Oz?
And Lissener thinks Juno has unrealistic dialogue. Give me a break. They sound exactly like the characters they were playing - awkward teenagers trying too hard to be cute and clever. Ever notice how none of the adults in that movie spoke with that style?
Yeah, I’m a lone voice howling in the wilderness, no one else here has expressed that opinion. If you’d read the thread you’ll see that many people, me included, have tried to explain the perceived difference between stylized speech that works, and stylized speech that doesn’t. In any case, you seem to make the point yourself: real teens try to sound that clever. They rarely succeed; they don’t tend to sound like they have a team of writers feeding them lines through an ear bud, like Juno does.
In 96 minutes, from pregnancy test to childbirth, nobody ever, ever, ever asked that girl about birth control. There was a throwaway gag involving a boysenberry condom in the clinic and that was it. She simply acted disgusted about the condom offer and her father and step-mother never discussed any sort of birth control options with her.
I look forward to watching the sequel in which she gets knocked up again because she’s too cool to use condoms and this time nobody thinks she’s cute.
It was an okay movie, but I felt like I was watching the movie that Juno herself would have made. Precious and cutesy and convinced of its own cleverness. The teenagers sounded like an artsy, goofy interpretation of what teenagers might speak like, but the adult dialogue was just idiotic. It was like what a sixteen year old might imagine adults saying.
I consider the French gore-horror film À l’intérieur to be the unofficial sequel to Juno. In it—
[warning: NOT for the faint of heart!]a pregnant woman, at home alone on Christmas Eve, is attacked and tortured in various creative ways for about an hour and a half by a mysterious housebreaker, who finally cuts her baby out with a pair of scissors.
The Village Voice called À l’intérieur “the motherfucking anti-Juno.”
I remember getting that impression, too–that is, that the adults acted like the way a 16-year-old really wishes adults acted like.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
Funnily enough, my main problem with Juno *wasn’t * really that she wasn’t getting tortured enough! Even though she did dare to be a pregnant 16 year old. But, good for the Village Voice for being so hip to French gore. :rolleyes:
Mosier-that’s why old films aren’t as good as more recent ones, IMO…but that’s for a new thread.
Yeah, I remember my parents thinking that Juno’s parents seemed really mellowed out for parents whose daughter has just revealed she’s pregnant. I mean, obviously supporting her is a good thing, and there’s not really anything they can do now that she’s already pregnant…but there didn’t seem to be much angst or turmoil about it. It’s the reaction most kids would definitely want to get from their parents.
Or the guy part of the adoptive couple, who’s all interested in Juno and stuff. I think most sixteen year olds would think having that kind of male attention would be cool and fun and pretty flattering, especially if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t get that from your peers.
This, to me, was the bigger fault to me than the stylized dialog (which I mostly liked). The cutesyness bugged me too, but I was more annoyed with the way birth-control was a non-issue in the film. I wouldn’t really have a problem with Juno being stupid and not using birth-control, it just felt like in the world of the film birth control didn’t even exist (despite the boysenberry condom).