JUNO – KILLING WITH QUIRKINESS

This movie is filling me with ambivalence. As a girl who does a show called “The Cute Show,” you’d think I’d be super into a quirky movie about an adorable pregnant teenage pixie who saunters around town swigging Sunny-D while Kimya Dawson plays in the background, whose bedroom is full of more kitschy knickknacks than Thora Birch’s in Ghost World, who wears a Slinky t-shirt stretched across her huge stomach, fills her boyfriend’s mailbox full of orange Tic-Tacs, and tries to hang herself with a red licorice rope. Oh and I almost forgot: She has a hamburger phone—and I have that exact same one!

So you’d think I’d be all over that, right? But here’s the thing: It’s too much! Wayyyyyy too much. The main annoyance is the dialogue, which is ridiculously overblown with slang and clever little phrases. It’s like Gilmore Girls (also irritating) times a million. No one can say anything normally. Every sentence has to have a whimsical little twist and be delivered at breakneck speed, dripping with sarcasm or irony or a big fat wink. Like when Juno calls Planned Parenthood on her hamburger phone and says nonchalantly, “Yes, I’d like to procure a hasty abortion.” Or when her water breaks and she yells, “Thundercats are go!” Ugh. Stop that!

The other thing is that, I don’t know, is it just me or did you want to smack the shit out of Juno? God, what a little smartmouth. She lives in the suburbs. Where did she get such a chip on her shoulder? She is way more cavalier than a pregnant 15-year-old in the suburbs should be. She’s not even a tiny bit embarrassed when all the kids in her high school stare at her. A teenage girl with zero self-consciousness? I don’t buy it.

And then there’s the cringeworthy scene in Jason Bateman’s little den covered in Melvins posters when he tries to school her in the music of his glory days by playing her Sonic Youth’s version of “Superstar.” He’s like, “Shh, shh, really listen to it, man.” I almost died from cringing so hard.

I did tear up at the ending, in the part with Jennifer Garner, which was one of the only truly heartfelt moments in the whole movie. But my ambivalence lies in the fact that I’d rather watch a quirky teen-girl movie than yet another testosterone-fest like No Country for Old Men. There do need to be more funny movies with chicks who aren’t just stereotypes, so I would like to be able to applaud the effort. (Sidenote: people always talk about how Judd Apatow is a misogynist. But he created Lindsay Weir!—Linda Cardellini’s smart and awesome character on Freaks & Geeks, who Ellen Page sort of looks like, actually) Anyway, everyone keeps saying that Juno is like a girl version of Superbad and I want there to be a girl version of Superbad, but I just really hope this isn’t it.

Oh, bonus grossness: As I was leaving the theater I heard a pudgy middle-aged man say about Juno: “I want to marry her.” Like, all swooningly. It’s that whole Garden State quirky-girl-will-save-the-sadsack thing all over again. Yuck!

AMY KELLNER