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Juno (2007)

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Cast: Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Diablo Cody, Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner.

Director: Jason Reitman

If one wants to face usual situations the answer is easy, stay home. We go to the cinema looking for stories. Movies, there are all kinds of them, possible, impossible, even based on true events. True events that are also unique. Otherwise, no one would be interested in them. Even nowadays trendy social radiographies focus on people i do not have the pleasure to know, and I know a lot of people. Thus, when one is in the mood for a teen comedy for adults, should not expect them to behave like the ones fluttering around, but like exceptions at the service of the industry, either the bigger or the smaller, the smaller in this case. Sometimes the lack of rigor when drawing, i should say caricaturize, a character can be forgiven if in the end we are entertained by a simple story. This is the case, Juno MacGuff is exceptional square, but her story works. All this to say that Juno is a little big movie, or a big little movie, or both, about one exceptional character and the people around her.

About the plot there is not much to say. The Sixteen years old Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) is pregnant. Her non-boyfriend, also a teen, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) is the father. After considering an abortion, Juno decides to look for the perfect parents for her baby in the Pennysaver. These are Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), him, a teen in the body of an adult that lives anchored in a past of punk and gore, her, a wannabe mother with all her homework done.

Jason Reitman, who already pleased us with Thank You for Smoking (2005), his first feature movie, succeeds in both directing and satisfying the audience. Chocolate then, strawberry now. With a much less pretentious proposal, he is able to both make us smile and seduce us with the fortune and misfortune of a teenager that turns to be one of the rudest characters I remember, but charming at the same time. If something we can throw on Reitman’s face, that is the use during the first thirty minutes of some visual resources that does not match the general trend of the film. And they do not match because visually the film goes in a less experimental and more conventional direction.

This said, Rietman measures up to a script way better than other I have recently digested. Better because Diablo Cody, a former stripper and now a writer (and a blogger), manages to after making up a unique exceptional character let more conventional ones behave around her from smile to smile in a bittersweet atmosphere. The script is made to make you fall in love and succeeds if you give it that little chance. Furthermore, the songs by Kimya Dawson, pure American folk, seem specially composed for the occasion. Nevertheless, I bet more than one will dislike them because of Dawson’s childish voice.

And then Ellen Page. She is probably (for sure) the best young actress around Hollywood. She already made an impact on many with Hard Candy (2005), which I recommend to all of you that enjoy independent psychological thrillers. Everything orbits around her in Juno and this is because the gravitational pull of her performance is strong enough to make everything stay in place. I would say Page and Cody, and less Reitman, are the ingredients that make Juno what it really is. The rest of the cast is shadowed by Page but still as good as one might expect.

Juno is a pleasant surprise full of one-liner characters. But I do not want anyone to get upset if in the end it turns to be too cute for yourself, because, despite its sourness, it might be a little bit too cute.

Recommended to those parents that if their daughters tell them they are pregnant would not get their eyes out of the Sudoku or the K9 Magazine, and to their daughters as well.