Oscar Cleanup: JUNO review by Dr. Royce Clemens

JUNO
* out of 4
Rated PG-13
Directed by Jason Reitman

"My thoughts were so loud I couldn't hear my mouth."-Modest Mouse

Jumping Fucking Jesus...

You people FELL FOR THIS PIECE OF SHIT?

From the "Overrated to the Point of Apoplexy" file comes JUNO. Lord knows I have seen worse movies, but precious few that have made me this angry. For ninety-six minutes I was locked in a theater with Juno MacGuff, the most unappealing lead character I've seen in 2007 that wasn't played by Dane Cook. Hipster to the core, she speaks only in variations upon semantics and pop culture references. That she is somehow considered precocious by so many (including 93 percent of critics) is beyond a mass error in judgment and actually borders upon a social epidemic. Like Disco and Fascism, many will look back upon the adoration heaped upon this movie and think "Well, we thought it was a good idea at the time..."

And now the kicker, JUNO has been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar next to three infinitely better movies and one I ain't even seen yet. This means the near-unanimous majority of critics, many of you, and THE ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND FUCKING SCIENCES couldn't spot the biggest fraud perpetrated upon the moviegoing public in the past ten years.

Ellen Page trades in the charisma and power she displayed in HARD CANDY for a pair of fucking clown-shoes in her annoyingly monotone performance as Juno MacGuff, a sixteen-year-old pretentious pain in the ass who is clearly above everything and everyone. And yet while the movie goes to great pains to establish that Juno is a thirty-year-old in a teenager's body, she is apparently rock stupid enough not to know that if you fuck a boy with no protection... BABIES HAPPEN!

And babies are exactly what happens. Juno gets knocked up and she eventually opts to give the baby away to two walking plot-devices played by Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Garner's freakishly prominent ribcage. Then everyone in the cast starts flinging one-liners at each other like machine gun fire. Here's a handy screenwriting lesson...

-If you have one person in your script talking like Conan O'Brien, it's funny.

-If EVERYONE in your movie talks like Conan O'Brien, it's not funny and you can't write. You fail. Start putting up aluminum siding or serving lunches in elementary schools for a career.

But Ellen Page isn't the only 2006 all-star that met their demise a scant year later. I am speaking, of course, of director Jason Reitman, whose visual verve and dark wit in THANK YOU FOR SMOKING have been neutered here. He is forced into a corner by JUNO's long and inane dialogue scenes. This results in keeping his camera stationary for long takes because he had no other way out. It's funny, because THANK YOU FOR SMOKING was all about poisonous verbal bullshit and the one man who knew how to control it form it into a hard cutting tool. Now here's JUNO which is nothing BUT said bullshit and Reitman can't keep his head above water.

Oh and before I forget, Michael Cera stars as the boy who knocked JUNO up. I hear there were EMTs on set to see to him in case he accidentally showed range or an emotion and it FUCKING KILLED HIM!

Juno herself is a cruel nutjob who insults everyone around her, including the couple she's giving the baby to, the lawyer handling the case and the parents trying to protect her. And being as she had sex with the Cera character with no protection, and (as the movie goes to great pains to point out) it was her idea, then she threw everyone in her gravitational pull into an emotional tailspin on purpose. This doesn't make Juno cute, quirky, witty or wise. It makes her a sociopath who must be stopped.

But the screenplay doesn't do anyone else any favors either. In a mean-spirited decision, the adoptive mother played by Jennifer Garner is written as a Type-A stereotype who belittles her husband and freaks out over every little thing. I have rarely pitied an actor more than I have Jennifer Garner because she tried with every fiber in her being to imbue her character with a little sympathy, almost to the point where she was bursting at the seams and it appeared to me that she was almost in physical pain. "Poor thing." as Mrs. Lovett would say. How many more lives will JUNO ruin?

"But Royce," my many detractors may say, "By the third act, Juno learns the error of her ways." Umm... No she doesn't. She goes through an arbitrary and tacked on happy ending that is pure screenwriting machination. I was left unconvinced and underwhelmed.

And the dialogue is among the worst I've seen in anything not done by John Waters. Only HIS had conviction. If you write a screenplay where characters say "Honest to blog," and "That's one doodle that can't be undid, Homeskillet," you shouldn't be given a development deal. You should be tagged and studied.

"But Royce," my detractors may pipe up again, "You give nods of approval to Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino and Joss Whedon whenever THEY have quirky dialogue!" Yeah, but their quirky dialogue has a point. It's there to reveal something about their inner natures or to lead back to an original statement for comic relief. It's not just free-floating references and cast off coined expressions floating through the air, having no effect on anyone or anything else. Quirk for the sake of quirk is annoying and an embarrassment.

I don't know anything about this Diablo Cody person who wrote Juno, other than someone convinced her that her crayons scribblings were art and that you're encouraging her. I can't make any assumptions on her character from anything I know about her now. All I know is what the movie could conceivably tell me, and what they tell me is that JUNO was written by a person incredibly desperate to convince the entire world that she is the coolest thing walking today. It's front-ended with pop culture references designed not for effect or relevance, but to convince us that she's seen movies TV, shows and bands. The thing is though, a couple of them are wrong. It's "ThunderBIRDS are go," not ThunderCATS.

And anyone who was REALLY into Dario Argento would know how to pronounce his first fucking name.

It's SIDEWAYS all over again. Remember that one? The movie about a fat, slobby nerd who thinks he's misunderstood that was liked by OTHER fat, slobby nerds who think they're misunderstood? I think they're called "critics." But I digress. And far be it from me to tear people apart who disagree with me...

No... On second thought, fuck that.

You. Yeah, YOU. JUNO is about a horrible human being who sees everyone else as inferior beyond measure, even the dude she claims to love by the end. Now if you are one of the many who heaped effusive praise upon this movie do me a favor...

Turn your computer off and close your eyes. Think about the movie. Think about the fact that you like it. Think about WHY you like it. And think about what that says about you as a human being.

I'll be here when you get back.