Juno’s an unusual girl whose personality matches her interesting first
name. Whip-smart, witty and mature beyond her age, Juno finds herself
pregnant after a sexual encounter with her best friend, Paulie Bleeker
(Michael Cera). Although at first she leans toward an abortion, going as
far as to visit a clinic before opting not to go through with it (the
deciding factor is that the baby already has fingernails), Juno decides
the wisest thing to do is to give the baby up for adoption. That
decision means she has to break the news to her dad (J.K. Simmons) and
stepmom (Allison Janney). After all, hiding an ever increasing tummy for
nine months is not really an option.
Sunday 30 December 2012
Friday 28 December 2012
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Thursday 27 December 2012
Juno movie cast and crew
Directed by
Jason Reitman
Ellen Page
Michael Cera
Jennifer Garner
Jason Bateman
Allison Janney
J.K. Simmons
Olivia Thirlby
Eileen Pedde
Rainn Wilson
Daniel Clark
Darla Fay
Aman Jhal
Valerie Tian
Jason Reitman
Ellen Page
Michael Cera
Jennifer Garner
Jason Bateman
Allison Janney
J.K. Simmons
Olivia Thirlby
Eileen Pedde
Rainn Wilson
Daniel Clark
Darla Fay
Aman Jhal
Valerie Tian
Juno movie overview
Once or twice a year we’re treated to a movie that’s strikingly fresh, engaging, and irresistible. Juno is one of those special films - the sort of movie you want to rushout and tell everyone to see. Juno’s so good it makes sitting in a crowded movie theater surrounded by obnoxious people who seem unable to resist the urge to talk or check text messages more than just worthwhile. Juno’s disarmingly charming and completely real, and one of the best films of 2007.
Juno’s an unusual girl whose personality matches her interesting first name. Whip-smart, witty and mature beyond her age, Juno finds herself pregnant after a sexual encounter with her best friend, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). Although at first she leans toward an abortion, going as far as to visit a clinic before opting not to go through with it (the deciding factor is that the baby already has fingernails), Juno decides the wisest thing to do is to give the baby up for adoption. That decision means she has to break the news to her dad (J.K. Simmons) and stepmom (Allison Janney). After all, hiding an ever increasing tummy for nine months is not really an option.
Surprisingly, the parents take the news not quite in stride, but at least without freaking out. Dad even goes as far as to visit the adoptive couple she’s picked out from an ad, and offers to help with the legal paperwork. Dubbing herself the ‘precautionary whale’, Juno remains at her high school although the sideways glances she’s used to receiving become full-on glares once the pregnancy is obvious.
As the delivery date approaches, Juno reassesses her relationship with Bleeker, a boy she’s always been attracted to but has denied having feelings for – other than friendship. She’s also forced into reassessing her plan to place their child with Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark (Jason Bateman) when the couple turns out to be not quite the perfect potential adoptive parents she thought they were.
Here’s what I learned from watching Juno: Ellen Page is a force to be reckoned with, screenwriter Diablo Cody is enormously talented, and director Jason Reitman proved Thank You for Smoking was not a fluke. That film skewered the tobacco industry, but Reitman takes it a little easier on teen pregnancy in Juno.
First-time screenwriter Cody, a former stripper/blogger, understands how people talk as well as how to build characters and tell a compelling story. The dialogue in Juno rings true. These aren’t merely characters tossing off witty lines and pithy comments. Cody’s got an incredible gift for writing out real conversations instead of the stilted Hollywood version that so often populates - and ruins - movies.
Whatever else Page does in what’s sure to be a lengthy, accolade-filled career, Juno will no doubt always be considered one of her finest performances. Page showed she had something special to offer in 2006’s Hard Candy, but with Juno she's catapulted into a new level of leading actors.
Janney, Simmons, Bateman, and Garner flesh out the adult roles, and each brings a little something special to the mix. Hot off a starring turn in this past summer’s blockbuster comedy, Superbad, Michael Cera settles for a supporting part in this, with his sad-sack demeanor and puppy dog eyes perfect for the part of a guy caught in the friend zone wanting more. It would been fun to see Bateman and Cera together for at least one short scene, but it also wouldn’t have made any sense to the story. Alas, keeping it real is better than adding a scene just to make all of us who miss Arrested Development (why do they always cancel the best shows?) happy about seeing a mini-reunion of ‘Michael’ and ‘George-Michael’.
Juno’s incredibly smart, funny, and heartwarming. But above all, it’s loaded with characters you want to get to know and who are fully fleshed out onscreen. Don't be frightened by the subject matter. Just go see this one with an open-mind and be ready to be entertained by one of the best movies of the yea
Juno’s an unusual girl whose personality matches her interesting first name. Whip-smart, witty and mature beyond her age, Juno finds herself pregnant after a sexual encounter with her best friend, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). Although at first she leans toward an abortion, going as far as to visit a clinic before opting not to go through with it (the deciding factor is that the baby already has fingernails), Juno decides the wisest thing to do is to give the baby up for adoption. That decision means she has to break the news to her dad (J.K. Simmons) and stepmom (Allison Janney). After all, hiding an ever increasing tummy for nine months is not really an option.
Surprisingly, the parents take the news not quite in stride, but at least without freaking out. Dad even goes as far as to visit the adoptive couple she’s picked out from an ad, and offers to help with the legal paperwork. Dubbing herself the ‘precautionary whale’, Juno remains at her high school although the sideways glances she’s used to receiving become full-on glares once the pregnancy is obvious.
As the delivery date approaches, Juno reassesses her relationship with Bleeker, a boy she’s always been attracted to but has denied having feelings for – other than friendship. She’s also forced into reassessing her plan to place their child with Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark (Jason Bateman) when the couple turns out to be not quite the perfect potential adoptive parents she thought they were.
Here’s what I learned from watching Juno: Ellen Page is a force to be reckoned with, screenwriter Diablo Cody is enormously talented, and director Jason Reitman proved Thank You for Smoking was not a fluke. That film skewered the tobacco industry, but Reitman takes it a little easier on teen pregnancy in Juno.
First-time screenwriter Cody, a former stripper/blogger, understands how people talk as well as how to build characters and tell a compelling story. The dialogue in Juno rings true. These aren’t merely characters tossing off witty lines and pithy comments. Cody’s got an incredible gift for writing out real conversations instead of the stilted Hollywood version that so often populates - and ruins - movies.
Whatever else Page does in what’s sure to be a lengthy, accolade-filled career, Juno will no doubt always be considered one of her finest performances. Page showed she had something special to offer in 2006’s Hard Candy, but with Juno she's catapulted into a new level of leading actors.
Janney, Simmons, Bateman, and Garner flesh out the adult roles, and each brings a little something special to the mix. Hot off a starring turn in this past summer’s blockbuster comedy, Superbad, Michael Cera settles for a supporting part in this, with his sad-sack demeanor and puppy dog eyes perfect for the part of a guy caught in the friend zone wanting more. It would been fun to see Bateman and Cera together for at least one short scene, but it also wouldn’t have made any sense to the story. Alas, keeping it real is better than adding a scene just to make all of us who miss Arrested Development (why do they always cancel the best shows?) happy about seeing a mini-reunion of ‘Michael’ and ‘George-Michael’.
Juno’s incredibly smart, funny, and heartwarming. But above all, it’s loaded with characters you want to get to know and who are fully fleshed out onscreen. Don't be frightened by the subject matter. Just go see this one with an open-mind and be ready to be entertained by one of the best movies of the yea
Juno movie review
Juno MacGuff, the title character of Jason Reitman’s new film, is 16 and pregnant, but “Juno” could not be further from the kind of hand-wringing, moralizing melodrama that such a condition might suggest. Juno, played by the poised, frighteningly talented Ellen Page, is too odd and too smart to be either a case study or the object of leering disapproval. She assesses her problem, and weighs her response to it, with disconcerting sang-froid.
It’s not that Juno treats her pregnancy as a joke, but rather that in the sardonic spirit of the screenwriter, Diablo Cody, she can’t help finding humor in it. Tiny of frame and huge of belly, Juno utters wisecracks as if they were breathing exercises, referring to herself as “the cautionary whale.”
At first her sarcasm is bracing and also a bit jarring — “Hello, I’d like to procure a hasty abortion,” she says when she calls a women’s health clinic — but as “Juno” follows her from pregnancy test to delivery room (and hastily retreats from the prospect of abortion), it takes on surprising delicacy and emotional depth. The snappy one-liners are a brilliant distraction, Ms. Cody’s way of clearing your throat for the lump you’re likely to find there in the movie’s last scenes.
The first time I saw “Juno,” I was shocked to find myself tearing up at the end, since I’d spent the first 15 minutes or so gnashing my teeth and checking my watch. The passive-aggressive pseudo-folk songs, the self-consciously clever dialogue, the generic, instantly mockable suburban setting — if you can find Sundance on a map, you’ll swear you’ve been here before.
But “Juno” (which played at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, not the one in Park City, Utah) respects the idiosyncrasies of its characters rather than exaggerating them or holding them up for ridicule. And like Juno herself, the film outgrows its own mannerisms and defenses, evolving from a coy, knowing farce into a heartfelt, serious comedy.
A good deal of the credit for this goes to Ms. Page, a 20-year-old Canadian who is able to seem, in the space of a single scene, mature beyond her years and disarmingly childlike. The naïveté that peeks through her flippant, wised-up facade is essential, since part of the movie’s point is that Juno is not quite as smart or as capable as she thinks she is.
It’s not simply that she has impulsive, unprotected sex with her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), or that she decides, against the advice of parents and friends, to have the baby and give it up for adoption. These, indeed, are choices she is prepared to defend and to live with. Rather, Juno’s immaturity resides in her familiar adolescent assumption that she understands the world better than her elders do, and that she can finesse the unintended consequences of her decisions.
The grown-ups, at first, seem like familiar caricatures of adolescent-centered cinema: square, sad and clueless. But Juno’s father (J. K. Simmons) and step-mother (Allison Janney) turn out to be complicated, intelligent people, too, and not just because they are played by two of the best character actors around. Ms. Cody’s script and Mr. Reitman’s understated, observant direction allow the personalities of the characters to emerge slowly, and to change in credible and unpredictable ways.
This is especially true of Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), the baby’s potential adoptive parents. The audience’s initial impression of them, like Juno’s, is of stereotypically smug yuppies trapped in rickety conventions of heterosexual domesticity. Vanessa is uptight and materialistic, while Mark tends the guttering flame of his youthful hipness, watching cult horror movies and trading alternative-rock mix CDs with Juno.
Juno is, on the surface at least, a familiar type, surrounding herself with and expressing herself by means of kitschy consumer detritus (she calls the clinic on a hamburger phone) and pop cultural ephemera. She could be the hero of a Judd Apatow comedy (like, say, Mr. Cera, the boneless wonder of “Superbad” and a purely delightful presence here). Except, of course, that she’s female. Ms. Cody, Mr. Reitman and Ms. Page have conspired, intentionally or not, to produce a feminist, girl-powered rejoinder and complement to “Knocked Up.” Despite what most products of the Hollywood comedy boys’ club would have you believe, it is possible to possess both a uterus and a sense of humor.
“Juno” also shares with “Knocked Up” an underlying theme, a message that is not anti-abortion but rather pro-adulthood. It follows its heroine — and by the end she has earned that title — on a twisty path toward responsibility and greater self-understanding.
This is the course followed by most coming-of-age stories, though not many are so daring in their treatment of teenage pregnancy, which this film flirts with presenting not just as bearable but attractive. Kids, please! Heed the cautionary whale. But in the meantime, have a good time at “Juno.” Bring your parents, too.
It’s not that Juno treats her pregnancy as a joke, but rather that in the sardonic spirit of the screenwriter, Diablo Cody, she can’t help finding humor in it. Tiny of frame and huge of belly, Juno utters wisecracks as if they were breathing exercises, referring to herself as “the cautionary whale.”
At first her sarcasm is bracing and also a bit jarring — “Hello, I’d like to procure a hasty abortion,” she says when she calls a women’s health clinic — but as “Juno” follows her from pregnancy test to delivery room (and hastily retreats from the prospect of abortion), it takes on surprising delicacy and emotional depth. The snappy one-liners are a brilliant distraction, Ms. Cody’s way of clearing your throat for the lump you’re likely to find there in the movie’s last scenes.
The first time I saw “Juno,” I was shocked to find myself tearing up at the end, since I’d spent the first 15 minutes or so gnashing my teeth and checking my watch. The passive-aggressive pseudo-folk songs, the self-consciously clever dialogue, the generic, instantly mockable suburban setting — if you can find Sundance on a map, you’ll swear you’ve been here before.
But “Juno” (which played at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, not the one in Park City, Utah) respects the idiosyncrasies of its characters rather than exaggerating them or holding them up for ridicule. And like Juno herself, the film outgrows its own mannerisms and defenses, evolving from a coy, knowing farce into a heartfelt, serious comedy.
A good deal of the credit for this goes to Ms. Page, a 20-year-old Canadian who is able to seem, in the space of a single scene, mature beyond her years and disarmingly childlike. The naïveté that peeks through her flippant, wised-up facade is essential, since part of the movie’s point is that Juno is not quite as smart or as capable as she thinks she is.
It’s not simply that she has impulsive, unprotected sex with her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), or that she decides, against the advice of parents and friends, to have the baby and give it up for adoption. These, indeed, are choices she is prepared to defend and to live with. Rather, Juno’s immaturity resides in her familiar adolescent assumption that she understands the world better than her elders do, and that she can finesse the unintended consequences of her decisions.
The grown-ups, at first, seem like familiar caricatures of adolescent-centered cinema: square, sad and clueless. But Juno’s father (J. K. Simmons) and step-mother (Allison Janney) turn out to be complicated, intelligent people, too, and not just because they are played by two of the best character actors around. Ms. Cody’s script and Mr. Reitman’s understated, observant direction allow the personalities of the characters to emerge slowly, and to change in credible and unpredictable ways.
This is especially true of Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), the baby’s potential adoptive parents. The audience’s initial impression of them, like Juno’s, is of stereotypically smug yuppies trapped in rickety conventions of heterosexual domesticity. Vanessa is uptight and materialistic, while Mark tends the guttering flame of his youthful hipness, watching cult horror movies and trading alternative-rock mix CDs with Juno.
Juno is, on the surface at least, a familiar type, surrounding herself with and expressing herself by means of kitschy consumer detritus (she calls the clinic on a hamburger phone) and pop cultural ephemera. She could be the hero of a Judd Apatow comedy (like, say, Mr. Cera, the boneless wonder of “Superbad” and a purely delightful presence here). Except, of course, that she’s female. Ms. Cody, Mr. Reitman and Ms. Page have conspired, intentionally or not, to produce a feminist, girl-powered rejoinder and complement to “Knocked Up.” Despite what most products of the Hollywood comedy boys’ club would have you believe, it is possible to possess both a uterus and a sense of humor.
“Juno” also shares with “Knocked Up” an underlying theme, a message that is not anti-abortion but rather pro-adulthood. It follows its heroine — and by the end she has earned that title — on a twisty path toward responsibility and greater self-understanding.
This is the course followed by most coming-of-age stories, though not many are so daring in their treatment of teenage pregnancy, which this film flirts with presenting not just as bearable but attractive. Kids, please! Heed the cautionary whale. But in the meantime, have a good time at “Juno.” Bring your parents, too.
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