Todd’s Movie Blog

Maybe it’s just me but I don’t get all of the hoopla about Juno (2007).  I’m constantly hearing about how it is so funny, it is so realistic, etc.  I just don’t understand what the big deal is.  The movie is pretty simple, teen girl gets pregnant, decides to give the baby up, the couple she is giving he/or she to get divorced, but the wife decides to adopt anyway, and Juno and her boyfriend become closer, the end.  I’m sorry, but take out Ellen Page’s snarky one liners she continually pulls out of an apparent mental bag of holding (a little D & D reference there for you die hard gamers), and all you have is an after school special my High School teachers used to love to tape off TV and show us during class, you know, stuff like Scott Baio showing the dangers of smoking pot.  It ’s like all the fanfare Napoleon Dynamite (2004) received, I didn’t get that either, a day in the life of a group of dysfunctional high schoolers, let the laughter begin.  Yet a truly interesting and different take on high schoolers, like Brick (2005), where an old style film noir mystery is told in a high school setting was virtually ignored by audiences.  Where was all the internet hoopla when that film came out?  I think Roger Ebert was one of the few critics who even wrote about it.  Yet Juno is a big ground breaking piece of independent cinema.  Whatever.