Why Juno Sucks Balls, And Why That Matters
Every ten years or so, a bad movie gets good reviews. And I don't mean that Bratz: The Movie scored a 21 on Metacritic when it deserved to get a -999, which would mean that by federal law everyone involved in its creation can be murdered without any legal repercussions whatsoever. No, I'm talking about movies like Titanic, a lumbering behemoth of a film that managed to gross 40 trillion million dollars, mostly because 12-year old girls saw it over and over again, attempting to imprint Leonardo DiCaprio's youthful face so deeply onto their minds eyes' that every unconscious moment would be dominated by his mien, like Gregory's face spanning the world entire at the conclusion of The Man Who Was Thursday.
Juno is another such film, our generation's Titanic, just like Paris Hilton is our generation's Marilyn Monore, or Gulf War II is our generation's Gulf War I. And like our American forefathers, when confronted with a Saddam Hussein, a Paris Hilton, or a Diablo Cody/Jason Reitman, it's our solemn duty to hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats. Or to write scathing blotrys that will cause the targets of their soul-crushing invective to realize their own stunning, insurmountable inadequacies and to then slit their own throats. Information Age and all that.
I'd like to begin by laying out a few facts.
As of my writing, Juno has amassed 100% positive reviews of Rotten Tomatoes' "Cream of the Crop" critics, ostensibly a collection of the most prestigious movie reviewers in film criticism-dom. It also has a score of 8.4, which suggests that the reviews are not mildly salutory, but overwhelmingly positive. The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men has a rating of 90%, and a score of 8.2.
No Country For Old Men is a searing, gorgeously composed meditation on the nature of evil, the inescapability of fate, and the inability of good men to overcome either. It is best thing the Coens have made since Fargo, and is one of the great films of the year, if not the decade.
Juno is a twee vector for Diablo Cody's "wit" and "humor" masquerading as a dramedy about a teenage girl's pregnancy.
These are the facts.
I don't want to rage apoplectic about the failure of Rotten Tomatoes or of film criticism in general. Metacritic, another review compilation site, is considerably less sanguine about Juno's quality. But Juno's success is real--it's been nominated for three Golden Globes, including Best Comedy and Best Screenplay, and is apparently a serious Oscar-contender. And I do think that Juno's ascendance is indicative of larger trends at work in the world.
"We're drowning in quirk," Michael Hirschorn pronounced in The Atlantic a few months ago. Hirschorn was too indiscriminate in his condemnation, lumping The Royal Tenenbaums and Flight of the Conchords together with cultural obscenities like Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite. But he's onto something. He's right to be skeptical of the kind of aesthetic that satisfies itself with reference and nostalgia, with what the British would call twee, dainty affectations that signify nothing.
The cynical emptiness at the heart of movies like Juno speaks to the triumph of a kind of fakery that's become endemic to a lot of artistic endeavors. Yes, all art is artifice, but the good stuff gets at the humanity, the hidden realities, of the situation. That's why in Pulp Fiction (Tarantino is a writer who specializes in successful stylization and who I've seen compared to Diablo Cody more than once) two hitmen can have a conversation about hamburgers--because what they're talking about is genuinely sort of interesting (of course they can't call in a quarter-pounder in a country that uses the metric system!), and because we might imagine that hitmen who've committed countless crimes before would talk about empty frivolities on their way to another hit. Or take this exchange between Butch and his girlfriend:
BUTCH
I'm sorry, baby-love.
FABIAN
(crying)
You were gone so long, I started to
think dreadful thoughts.
BUTCH
I'm sorry I worried you, sweetie.
Everything's fine. Hey, how was
breakfast?
FABIAN
(waterworks drying a
little)
It was good --
BUTCH
-- did you get the blueberry
pancakes?
FABIAN
No, they didn't have blueberry
pancakes, I had to get buttermilk
-- are you sure you're okay?
BUTCH
Baby-love, from the moment I left
you, this has been without a doubt
the single weirdest day of my
entire life. Climb on an' I'll
tell ya about it.
Fabian does climb on. Butch STARTS her up.
FABIAN
Butch, whose motorcycle is this?
BUTCH
It's a chopper.
FABIAN
Whose chopper is this?
BUTCH
Zed's.
FABIAN
Who's Zed?
BUTCH
Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead.
The exchange is stylized, it's not realistic (how could it be, really, since it follows a scene in which Butch slices up a couple of redneck rapists with a samurai sword), but it still manages to engage with real situations and emotions, as Butch desperately tries to talk his flighty girlfriend into coming with him without asking too many questions. Tarantino's dialogue sparkles because he consciously juxtaposes the absurd with the mundane, and finds humanity and humor in both. That's where the comedy comes from, why pancakes are funny, and why Tarantino deserves credit as a stylish writer.
Juno's dialogue isn't funny because it's phoney. Look at this exchange from early on in Juno:
ROLLO, the eccentric drugstore clerk, sneers at Juno from
behind the counter. He wears a polyester uniform vest.
ROLLO
Well, well. If it isn’t MacGuff the
Crime Dog! Back for another test?
JUNO
I think the last one was defective.
The plus sign looked more like a
division sign.
Rollo regards her with intense skepticism.
JUNO
I remain unconvinced.
Rollo pulls the bathroom key out of reach.
ROLLO
This is your third test today, Mama
Bear. Your eggo is preggo, no doubt
about it!
An eavesdropping TOUGH GIRL wearing an oversized jacket and
lots of makeup gapes at Juno from the beauty aisle.
TOUGH GIRL
Three times? Oh girl, you are way
pregnant. It’s easy to tell. Is
your nipples real brown?
A pile of stolen COSMETICS falls out of the girl’s jacket and
clatters to the floor.
TOUGH GIRL
Balls!
Juno crosses and crosses her legs awkwardly, hopping. It’s
obvious she has to use the bathroom urgently.
ROLLO
Maybe you’re having twins. Maybe
your little boyfriend’s got mutant
sperms and he knocked you up twice!
JUNO
Silencio! I just drank my weight in
Sunny D. and I have to go, pronto.
Why is Rollo so antagonistic? There's no hint that he has any kind of prior relationship with Juno. Instead we're left to conclude that we're deep in the territory of Quirk-Land, a kind of twisted Fairy realm populated by impossibly verbose pixie girls and angry drugstore clerks and stepmoms with oh-so-random predilictions for cutting pictures of dogs out of magazines, where the rivers flow with Sunny Delight and the ubiquitous chords of cloying indie bands fill the air.
How else to explain Juno's familiarity with Soupy Sales (the only person I know who knows who Soupy Sales is is my 60-year old father), or with Thunderbirds? Who, indeed, is apparently such a wit that she has the presence of mind to make a Thunderbirds reference just as her water breaks? That moment, in fact, nicely encapsulates Juno's dual failures: a complete lack of authenticity coupled with a tin-ear for comedy; making references to mid 60s puppet shows is not inherently funny. Over and over again, Cody mistakes reference or inappropriate explictness (nipples! pregnancy! eggo preggo!) for comedy.
Juno judiciously avoids any engagement with reality. It carefully sidesteps any hint of the extreme strains her tiny body must be undergoing--Juno carries her child as lightly as, well, a fat suit. It dances around the social consequences of being pregnant and in high school. It teeters dangerously close to genuine drama with the strange, uncomfortable relationship between Jason Bateman and Juno, but then backs away at the last second. And yes, certainly, of course, it stays far far away from examining Juno's decision to carry the pregnancy in the first place-- the burden of that decision is passed off on a suitably lame (read Asian) pro-life protester and another round of "comedy" from the inappropriately explicit abortion clinic front desk clerk.
All that would be perfectly OK if Juno's ambitions were purely comedic...but they're not, and anyway, the "comedy" is mostly contained in inane, artificial lines like, "Honest to Blog." Honest to Blog? Really? Not only does no one talk like that, no one wants to talk like that. Anyone who did talk like that would be taken out and shot. And I would be glad that they had been shot. Whoever did the shooting would receive a medal of some kind, and a delicious roast ham.
So what does Juno's ascendence mean for you and me? I hesitate to use the success of the latest flavor of the month to extrapolate broad social trends, but I do think movies like Juno suggest the triumph of easy laughs and unearned bathos over genuine humor and hard-won emotion. It's all style over substance, a kind of carefully manufactured reality, carefully crafted to stimulate without demanding anything of the audience other than that they laugh and cry on cue, when the film says that it's being funny or moving without ever actually being either. In its fakery it's not entirely unlike, say, a certain screenwriter with a catchy pseudonym and a manufactured resume involving a trumped-up stripping career which just happened, purely by accident mind you, to be parlayed into a successful blog and an an adoring press junket.
There's a brief little moment in Juno that threatens to blow the whole farce wide open, to expose the charade. It's gone before it really registers, but it surprised me, and stuck with me. As Juno calls the clinic to set up the abortion on her silly hamburger-shaped phone, she says, "What was that? I’m sorry, I’m on my hamburger phone and it’s kind of awkward to talk on. It’s really more of a novelty than a functional appliance."
That's about right.
Every ten years or so, a bad movie gets good reviews. And I don't mean that Bratz: The Movie scored a 21 on Metacritic when it deserved to get a -999, which would mean that by federal law everyone involved in its creation can be murdered without any legal repercussions whatsoever. No, I'm talking about movies like Titanic, a lumbering behemoth of a film that managed to gross 40 trillion million dollars, mostly because 12-year old girls saw it over and over again, attempting to imprint Leonardo DiCaprio's youthful face so deeply onto their minds eyes' that every unconscious moment would be dominated by his mien, like Gregory's face spanning the world entire at the conclusion of The Man Who Was Thursday.
Juno is another such film, our generation's Titanic, just like Paris Hilton is our generation's Marilyn Monore, or Gulf War II is our generation's Gulf War I. And like our American forefathers, when confronted with a Saddam Hussein, a Paris Hilton, or a Diablo Cody/Jason Reitman, it's our solemn duty to hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats. Or to write scathing blotrys that will cause the targets of their soul-crushing invective to realize their own stunning, insurmountable inadequacies and to then slit their own throats. Information Age and all that.
I'd like to begin by laying out a few facts.
As of my writing, Juno has amassed 100% positive reviews of Rotten Tomatoes' "Cream of the Crop" critics, ostensibly a collection of the most prestigious movie reviewers in film criticism-dom. It also has a score of 8.4, which suggests that the reviews are not mildly salutory, but overwhelmingly positive. The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men has a rating of 90%, and a score of 8.2.
No Country For Old Men is a searing, gorgeously composed meditation on the nature of evil, the inescapability of fate, and the inability of good men to overcome either. It is best thing the Coens have made since Fargo, and is one of the great films of the year, if not the decade.
Juno is a twee vector for Diablo Cody's "wit" and "humor" masquerading as a dramedy about a teenage girl's pregnancy.
These are the facts.
I don't want to rage apoplectic about the failure of Rotten Tomatoes or of film criticism in general. Metacritic, another review compilation site, is considerably less sanguine about Juno's quality. But Juno's success is real--it's been nominated for three Golden Globes, including Best Comedy and Best Screenplay, and is apparently a serious Oscar-contender. And I do think that Juno's ascendance is indicative of larger trends at work in the world.
"We're drowning in quirk," Michael Hirschorn pronounced in The Atlantic a few months ago. Hirschorn was too indiscriminate in his condemnation, lumping The Royal Tenenbaums and Flight of the Conchords together with cultural obscenities like Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite. But he's onto something. He's right to be skeptical of the kind of aesthetic that satisfies itself with reference and nostalgia, with what the British would call twee, dainty affectations that signify nothing.
The cynical emptiness at the heart of movies like Juno speaks to the triumph of a kind of fakery that's become endemic to a lot of artistic endeavors. Yes, all art is artifice, but the good stuff gets at the humanity, the hidden realities, of the situation. That's why in Pulp Fiction (Tarantino is a writer who specializes in successful stylization and who I've seen compared to Diablo Cody more than once) two hitmen can have a conversation about hamburgers--because what they're talking about is genuinely sort of interesting (of course they can't call in a quarter-pounder in a country that uses the metric system!), and because we might imagine that hitmen who've committed countless crimes before would talk about empty frivolities on their way to another hit. Or take this exchange between Butch and his girlfriend:
BUTCH
I'm sorry, baby-love.
FABIAN
(crying)
You were gone so long, I started to
think dreadful thoughts.
BUTCH
I'm sorry I worried you, sweetie.
Everything's fine. Hey, how was
breakfast?
FABIAN
(waterworks drying a
little)
It was good --
BUTCH
-- did you get the blueberry
pancakes?
FABIAN
No, they didn't have blueberry
pancakes, I had to get buttermilk
-- are you sure you're okay?
BUTCH
Baby-love, from the moment I left
you, this has been without a doubt
the single weirdest day of my
entire life. Climb on an' I'll
tell ya about it.
Fabian does climb on. Butch STARTS her up.
FABIAN
Butch, whose motorcycle is this?
BUTCH
It's a chopper.
FABIAN
Whose chopper is this?
BUTCH
Zed's.
FABIAN
Who's Zed?
BUTCH
Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead.
The exchange is stylized, it's not realistic (how could it be, really, since it follows a scene in which Butch slices up a couple of redneck rapists with a samurai sword), but it still manages to engage with real situations and emotions, as Butch desperately tries to talk his flighty girlfriend into coming with him without asking too many questions. Tarantino's dialogue sparkles because he consciously juxtaposes the absurd with the mundane, and finds humanity and humor in both. That's where the comedy comes from, why pancakes are funny, and why Tarantino deserves credit as a stylish writer.
Juno's dialogue isn't funny because it's phoney. Look at this exchange from early on in Juno:
ROLLO, the eccentric drugstore clerk, sneers at Juno from
behind the counter. He wears a polyester uniform vest.
ROLLO
Well, well. If it isn’t MacGuff the
Crime Dog! Back for another test?
JUNO
I think the last one was defective.
The plus sign looked more like a
division sign.
Rollo regards her with intense skepticism.
JUNO
I remain unconvinced.
Rollo pulls the bathroom key out of reach.
ROLLO
This is your third test today, Mama
Bear. Your eggo is preggo, no doubt
about it!
An eavesdropping TOUGH GIRL wearing an oversized jacket and
lots of makeup gapes at Juno from the beauty aisle.
TOUGH GIRL
Three times? Oh girl, you are way
pregnant. It’s easy to tell. Is
your nipples real brown?
A pile of stolen COSMETICS falls out of the girl’s jacket and
clatters to the floor.
TOUGH GIRL
Balls!
Juno crosses and crosses her legs awkwardly, hopping. It’s
obvious she has to use the bathroom urgently.
ROLLO
Maybe you’re having twins. Maybe
your little boyfriend’s got mutant
sperms and he knocked you up twice!
JUNO
Silencio! I just drank my weight in
Sunny D. and I have to go, pronto.
Why is Rollo so antagonistic? There's no hint that he has any kind of prior relationship with Juno. Instead we're left to conclude that we're deep in the territory of Quirk-Land, a kind of twisted Fairy realm populated by impossibly verbose pixie girls and angry drugstore clerks and stepmoms with oh-so-random predilictions for cutting pictures of dogs out of magazines, where the rivers flow with Sunny Delight and the ubiquitous chords of cloying indie bands fill the air.
How else to explain Juno's familiarity with Soupy Sales (the only person I know who knows who Soupy Sales is is my 60-year old father), or with Thunderbirds? Who, indeed, is apparently such a wit that she has the presence of mind to make a Thunderbirds reference just as her water breaks? That moment, in fact, nicely encapsulates Juno's dual failures: a complete lack of authenticity coupled with a tin-ear for comedy; making references to mid 60s puppet shows is not inherently funny. Over and over again, Cody mistakes reference or inappropriate explictness (nipples! pregnancy! eggo preggo!) for comedy.
Juno judiciously avoids any engagement with reality. It carefully sidesteps any hint of the extreme strains her tiny body must be undergoing--Juno carries her child as lightly as, well, a fat suit. It dances around the social consequences of being pregnant and in high school. It teeters dangerously close to genuine drama with the strange, uncomfortable relationship between Jason Bateman and Juno, but then backs away at the last second. And yes, certainly, of course, it stays far far away from examining Juno's decision to carry the pregnancy in the first place-- the burden of that decision is passed off on a suitably lame (read Asian) pro-life protester and another round of "comedy" from the inappropriately explicit abortion clinic front desk clerk.
All that would be perfectly OK if Juno's ambitions were purely comedic...but they're not, and anyway, the "comedy" is mostly contained in inane, artificial lines like, "Honest to Blog." Honest to Blog? Really? Not only does no one talk like that, no one wants to talk like that. Anyone who did talk like that would be taken out and shot. And I would be glad that they had been shot. Whoever did the shooting would receive a medal of some kind, and a delicious roast ham.
So what does Juno's ascendence mean for you and me? I hesitate to use the success of the latest flavor of the month to extrapolate broad social trends, but I do think movies like Juno suggest the triumph of easy laughs and unearned bathos over genuine humor and hard-won emotion. It's all style over substance, a kind of carefully manufactured reality, carefully crafted to stimulate without demanding anything of the audience other than that they laugh and cry on cue, when the film says that it's being funny or moving without ever actually being either. In its fakery it's not entirely unlike, say, a certain screenwriter with a catchy pseudonym and a manufactured resume involving a trumped-up stripping career which just happened, purely by accident mind you, to be parlayed into a successful blog and an an adoring press junket.
There's a brief little moment in Juno that threatens to blow the whole farce wide open, to expose the charade. It's gone before it really registers, but it surprised me, and stuck with me. As Juno calls the clinic to set up the abortion on her silly hamburger-shaped phone, she says, "What was that? I’m sorry, I’m on my hamburger phone and it’s kind of awkward to talk on. It’s really more of a novelty than a functional appliance."
That's about right.
posted by Michael at 9:46 PM
13 Comments:
You, sir, are amazing and spot on.
Thank you for not buying into Juno's garbage.
Although I agree with some of your points, I actually liked this movie in spite of its overly quirky, zany, style.
If you can't see the emotional value in a parentless couple desperate to get a baby and the awkward dance that happens between the birth parent(s) and adoptive parent(s) then I think you've limited your emotional scope just a tad. Because that to me was where this movie shined, especially with Jennifer Garner's character. Yes it was trying too hard to be quirky for quirky's sake but I can't discount the whole movie because of that. Not when I felt it actually portayed the Vanessa character and her reactions and fears so sincerely.
Also just as a sidenote on the whole Soupy Sales bit-she only mentions Soupy Sales because supposedly the character of Katrina smells like soup. This doesn't indicate she actually knows who the hell Soupy Sales is, she just probably heard that name thrown around and used it. Who hasn't referenced something they were actually completely ignorant of simply because it sounded good? It happens.
Oh boy , your words are like a bucket of fresh water.... i just saw this piece of crap yesterday, actually pulled it out at 45 minutes, and i couldn't sleep straight the whole night and i woke up like i ate a turd before sleeping.
So thanks for bringing justice to this shit and for make me feel not alone.
And thaks so much for understaning the genius of Tarantino so well, it is really apreciated.
You really nailed it. I was looking up other blog postings about Juno in order to write my own but you've nailed it so well, I don't think I even need to write my own take on it; I'll just send anyone who disagrees with me over here.
Next up: Entartete Kunst v. Reichminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda as movies that don't appeal to the plebs are shunned in favor of vulgar drivel.
In all honesty, I think the critics viewed this film more as a refreshing escape, the sole goal of which was to be entertaining and fantastic. Recall the opening credits in which the image was explicitly cartoonish and flippant. To that end, this movie was successful; while I do see a trend in which productions like this one (e.g. Garden State, Knocked Up) garner a substantial following (maybe less with the latter...), I think they're widely recognized as ephemeral. I don't think people will talk about Juno five or ten years down the line as they will (and do) Pulp Fiction.
Finally, I don't see this as a new trend, as people have always enjoyed the little bits of non-avant-garde entertainment that come their way (cf. Terminator 2 [RT 97%], Goldfinger [92%], Die Hard [96%]).
The story had a lot of holes and most of it didn't make sense. If anyone who liked the movie and had a brain in their head actually sat down and thought about it, they would realize that this is purely just Diablo Cody's intense form of masturbation. The dialogue was the most irritating shit I've ever heard. I HATED Juno's character throughout the movie. She was merely this one-dimensional snotty brat who didn't give two shits about her baby.
Don't get me wrong, I thought the acting was pretty good. Jennifer Garner was fantastic. Everyone did a good job. I primarily blame Diablo Cody for this sack of horse shit film. I could write about ten pages about how awful it was but the critic here did a pretty good job.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I was starting to think I was the only person on the planet who doesn't like this movie. And your argument explains why in ways I never could.
Beautiful. :'-)
Bravo! As a sixteen-year-old girl who listens to the Violent Femmes and enjoys films such as Rushmore and Heathers, I am completely expected to adore this film and automatically put it under my 'Movies' section on MySpace. Alas, I thought the film was okay, but 100% over-hyped. Cute film to go see with your mother? Sure. Oscar-worthy? I think not.
And thanks for pointing out that NOBODY talks like that in real life. Although I have noticed girls my age using phrases such as "Yo-yo-yiggity-yo" and "Woah! Dream big!"
Also, I would like to point out that in every interview with Ellen Page, they describe her as someone who is just like Juno, from the way she dresses to the way she talks. If this is true, I definatly don't think she deserves any award seeing that it doesn't take too much acting ability to play yourself.
haa yess! booe you're amazing. please make this your job, you're most excellent at it.
Thank you Thank you! You just gave me a reason to live and to write about this movie, I precariously saw tonight while excercising. After three minutes of watching it, I turned the channel, but I wanted to learn more as to why the music was bad besides it's bad style over no substance, so I watched the rest of it. And googled "juno sucks" to find your post/blog. Thanks.
Really good analysis- For me the main issue was that every other character had to have a "flaw" to make Juno's constant stupid jokes- the kind rcih couple who want to take the baby are a bit naff, and so on.
Damn right. Juno was so nauseating I started to think of reasons to like it as part of a brain game -- 1) Bren, seen as just a nuisance, does kick into high gear when there's finally a real family crisis, particularly one the dad would consider a crisis (eh) and 2) jennifer garner. I know bitches like vanessa loring. Garner was great. And it seems like the script was never polished...like...maybe the first few drafts painted Loring real real badly, and Cody realized that if she wanted to get this thing made and liked she would have to be nicer to the character...that's why in the same scene where Juno sees how touched Vanessa is by the baby kicking, we hear the vicious line "she's gonna steal that baby for her collection"
I agree with everything you said, except for the Jason Bateman part. That was Michael Cera.
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