Juno

Accidentally, I saw Juno last weekend, a cautionary note follows.

First on a positive note, the best thing about Juno is this dialogue

Juno: I think I'm, like, in love with you.
Paulie: You mean as friends?
Juno: No, I mean, like, for real. 'Cause you're, like, the coolest person I've ever met, and you don't even have to try, you know...
Paulie: I try really hard, actually.

This dialogue is "insightful" because it tells you all about the movie. Juno tries too hard to be weird, cool, peppy and hip but at the same time tries to hide all the effort using some witty dialogues so that the viewers are bought to an average teenager's level and are comfortably beaten there. Actually Juno reminds me of my pseudo-intellectual into-rock friend, who sounds intelligent only in the first meeting, after that he is an amusement park of shallow but cool cliches. Also, his way of overwhelming (or overpowering or even embarrasing) you is to ask what you like in rock or literature or films, and when you choose the most high-brow of what you know, then he adds up an esoteric fan-only name asking "Have you ever heard of it". His sole aim is gaining tips of nerdy icebergs (to add to his faux-charm, he hates usual cultural capital icebergs). Sooner or later, the titanic sinks.

Juno is exactly the film one should be beware of. Apart from being a hip teenager's self help book (or rather coolness-dictionary), it is moderately charming without being too saccharine. Its not too dishonest, its not too harsh, its not too feministic or anti-feministic, its not too motherly or fatherly, its moderately smart (or eccentric or weird), its a moderate basher of everything, its sufficiently rebellious and adequately tame, it is also little "deep" to complete the checklist, it has all the things which would not let an average movie goer to say that the film is particularly bad and will also give him/her a reason or two to believe in its goodness or worse relate to it. This film almost makes a formula for being everything for all.

As an antidote to Juno's teenage smugness, please rent the DVD of Ghost World.

pic: In order to "prove" that pregnant women eat more, it is not enough in director's world to let Juno eat more, but to "make" the contrast purer and clearer, Juno's friend must be starved just because she aint pregnant, its inhuman.