Evil Dead (2013)

I’ll Swallow Your Soul!

I had a lot of trepidation when I went into today’s movie. It was based almost entirely on the fact that I remember having a great deal of respect for the movie that this movie was rebooting. But now that I think about it, I’ve felt that way before. Dredd and Total Recall were both remakes of movies I thought I liked, but didn’t when I watched them again, allowing their remakes to blow the originals out of the water. I assumed the same would happen when I watched the remake of Red Dawn, but that one let me down. There had to be some remake movie that could fit in as the third movie. Maybe today’s movie would accomplish that. Let’s find out as I review the remake of Evil Dead, remaking the movie by Sam Raimi, written by Rodo Sayagues and Diablo Cody, co-written and directed by Fede Alvarez, and starring Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas, Elizabeth Blackmore, and Phoenix Connolly.

A group of friends (well, they used to be. They kind of hate each other now) meet at a cabin in the woods to give Mia (Jane Levy) the opportunity to kick her drug addiction. Her brother, David (Shiloh Fernandez), would like to also take this opportunity to repair his relationship with his sister. He also brings his girlfriend, Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore). I don’t know what that has to do with the other statement, but I had introductions to do, okay?! Anyway, Mia also brings her friends, the nurse Olivia (Jessica Lucas) and the school teacher Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) to help her overcome her addiction. As Mia starts going through withdrawals, she complains of a smell of death coming from the house that no one else but her and the dog can smell. The dog helps them unearth a cellar where they find animal corpses suspended from the ceiling, a double-barreled shotgun, and a book made of human skin, wrapped in a trash bag and tied with barbed wire. Eric’s curiosity not only kills the cat, but goes back in time and kills the cat’s parents. He opens and reads from the book, unleashing something into the woods that is not of this Earth.

I don’t know if I’ll ever write a review for it, but I rewatched the original movie not long after watching the remake, and sadly I’d have to admit that I found the remake far superior. I say sadly because I actually remember liking the original movie a lot, but on rewatching I was not really on board with it. This remake was not perfect, but it did all the things that the original movie did right and improved on them. The original had next to no story for instance, and this one had a fairly simple, but fairly solid story. Originally, it was just people going to a cabin in the woods to hang out and getting caught up in this mess. This movie had a much better reason to go to the cabin with the drug addiction thing, although it was a fairly stupid reason. I know this chick nurse thinks she can handle something like a drug addiction, but this would’ve worked out better for Mia (for so many reasons) if you had taken this chick to a legitimate rehab facility. Dr. Drew would’ve fixed that girl up fast. And then you all get killed because you wanted to handle it on your own. Dr. Drew doesn’t even rehab people alone! The other people you brought certainly weren’t helpful. All Eric wanted to do was get everyone killed by reading from a book filled with blood, death, and demons, wrapped in human skin. That’s not foreboding at all. Once the demon stuff started happening, there were a couple of things I took issue with, but a couple of things they still improved on from the original. For instance, in the original anyone could turn evil for no particular reason. In this one, it at least seemed to be transmitted by injury. That also meant that no one should’ve been surprised when Eric came back at the end. But I also don’t know why the demons were so stupid. When they look like the person they inhabit, they are fairly able to manipulate people, but they always have to change back into a demon to say something, thus reminding the person why they were cool with killing you. Like the girl in the very beginning. Her dad didn’t look like he was going to be able to kill her when she looked like his daughter, but then she goes demon and he lights her ass on fire and blows her head off. They also fall for the other side of that too, when the person that’s been possessed starts acting scared and innocent and people are too stupid to get their friends before checking on it. Those people were dicks too, by the way. Apparently, they just broke into someone else’s house, lit a girl on fire and shot her in the head in their cellar, and left behind a bunch of dead animals and the fuckin’ Necronomicon for the real owners. That’s top-shelf douchlery right there. Also, the Necronomicon in this movie seemed to tell the entire story of the movie. It made me wonder why Eric didn’t just skip to the end and find out what to do, like I do with any book I read. Also, why does the picture of the demon in the book have a candle over his head? Is that the medieval way to say it has an idea?

There are a couple of things they did very well in this movie. First was the atmosphere. They created a fantastic atmosphere early in the movie and kept it going all the way through. The second was gore. I assume that one of the things that made the original movie so popular was how well they did the gore with so little money. They threw money at this movie, and they used it to amp up that gore to the point where it made me squirm on at least one occasion. Did you see the trailer where the girl cut her tongue in half with an Exacto Knife? That’s the one! All the other gore was very well done too, but that one particularly got to me. The third was their homages to the original movie. They had a pendant that was reminiscent of the one Ash gave his girlfriend without being identical. They also had a super badass ending where the chainsaw on the arm came into effect. And it was awesome. One of the first questions I has about this movie was if they did the tree rape or not. The answer is kinda. What they did kind of made more sense, and didn’t look nearly as goofy. It was, in fact, scary, and didn’t look like someone whacked a lady in the vag with a broom handle.

The cast did a fairly good job. Most weren’t playing likeable characters, but they were playing them well. The one I liked the least was Olivia, played by Jessica Lucas. She was a bitch. She made it pretty clear in the movie. The first time we meet her she gets snarky with someone because they refer to her as a doctor, and she’s a registered nurse. Bitch, she gave you a promotion! I’m not even in the medical field, but if someone called me a doctor, I’d consider it a compliment. Also a dick was Eric, who caused the whole mess. And was regularly a dick anyway. He was bitchy towards David from the beginning because, as he put it, he hasn’t cared about them for the past century. They all do look very good for their age, though. I spent a lot of the movie trying to figure out who was supposed to be the Ash character in this movie. Turns out it’s kind of a few of them. David has the look but not the chin for it, Natalie takes her arm off because of infection, and Mia is the one who survives. Perhaps it was Bruce Campbell because he IS Ash and shows up at the end and says Groovy, but only if you stick around for the credits. I understand that David should probably have a problem killing his girlfriend, but I didn’t understand why he had a problem with it by the time she turned demon. She had nails in her face and was missing an arm. I’d have no use for her anymore, even if she lost the demon stuff. She was no longer hot.

I thought the remake of Evil Dead was awesome, and superior to the original. I always was a bigger fan of Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness though, since those were when they started getting funny. I thought this remake improved on everything that was enjoyable about the first one. The story was similar, but much better. They had a lot more money and thus a lot better gore. And the performances in this movie were all great and not kinda goofy as they were in the original. Of course, none of the people in this movie were Bruce Campbell (except for Bruce Campbell, that is) and he pretty much made the original movies for me. Even without the be-chined one, this movie is worth watching. Get to a theater and check it out. Evil Dead gets “Feast on this, motherfucker!” out of “I feel better now.”

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Young Adult (2011)

Guys Like Me Are Born Loving Women Like You

Today’s movie is another film I wanted to see, but mainly because of one of the people in it.  And it wasn’t even the star.  I wanted to see this movie because Patton Oswalt was in it, and I love him.  But one thing that kind of held me back was that it didn’t seem like a comedy, like I would normally like to see Patton doing.  He’s a hilarious guy, after all.  It seemed more like a drama, so I wasn’t really down for that.  But I saw it a couple of times in a RedBox, so I finally decided that I should just go ahead and watch the movie and find out.  And then, during the opening credits, I found out it was written by Diablo Cody, so I got a little more bummed out for what I was in for.  I watched it anyway, so here’s my review of Young Adult, written by Diablo Cody, directed by Jason Reitman, and starring Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, Patrick Wilson, Elizabeth Reaser, Collette Wolfe, Jill Eikenberry, Mary Beth Hurt, and J.K. Simmons.

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a ghost writer on the once-popular Waverly Prep series of young adult novels.  That’s where the title of the movie comes from!  She is in the process of writing the final book in the series when she receives an email inviting her to come and see the newborn daughter of her high school boyfriend, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), and his wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser).  Eventually, Mavis’ psychosis leads her to believe this is a sign that she needs to return to her home town of Mercury, Minnesota to save Buddy from the situation he’s trapped in.  She reconnects with a guy she went to high school with named Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt).  Matt was disabled in high school after being brutally beaten because some jocks believed he was gay.  He wasn’t, but he was crippled in the process nonetheless.  He currently lives with his sister, Sandra (Collette Wolfe), and does a pretty convincing impression of Patton Oswalt by being fairly nerdy and painting action figures.  Though Matt tries to talk Mavis out of it, she starts to make her moves to convince Buddy to leave his wife for her.

I feel somewhat close to saying that this movie was good in spite of Diablo Cody’s writing.  The movie left me pretty confused, but not for the same reason’s as yesterday’s movie.  This movie just didn’t seem to have a point.  At the end of the movie everyone is pretty much exactly the same as when the movie began, so it seems like it probably shouldn’t have taken an hour and a half to get back to where we started.  I’m sure El Diablo wants to break from the overused traditions of “character arc”, but it just makes the movie pointless.  There’s not really a message to the movie, there’s no resolution to the movie, so why did I watch it?  I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it; I did.  But I don’t think what I liked has much to do with The Devil Cody.  It’s not very funny and the main character is not likeable, so I only like spending time with her because she’s so attractive.  I can only relate to her in one way, so I’m not that committed.  And the way I can relate to her is that we have the same writing style.  And by that I mean we write a sentence and then get distracted by something on the internet for an hour.  But I’m not an alcoholic, I’m not a FAMOUS writer, I’m not a super attractive lady, I don’t go around trying to mess up people’s relationships, so I don’t really care what happens to her because she’s not a very good human being and I can’t put myself in her shoes.  There’s only one thing that surprised me in the movie and it happened at the very end so ::SPOILER ALERT::  Charlize has sex with Patton Oswalt.  Good show, old boy!  When I started watching the movie, I actually wrote in my notes that there was a slim chance that Patton would end up with Charlize, so I was really surprised when it happened.  It would be an inspiration to nerdy, unappealing guys like myself that someone as gorgeous as Charlize Theron would actually have sex with us … after she had just humiliated herself in front of the friends and family of her ex-boyfriend and she needed a rebound.  But hey, I’d take it.  But Dildablo Cody doesn’t want to have character arcs and story in her movies, so she gets up and leaves Patton in bed the next morning, going back home to wait for someone else she blew in high school to casually mention they had a baby.  ::END SPOILERS::

Writing aside, the real thing to enjoy about this movie is the performances.  It’s no surprise that Charlize Theron’s a great actress.  Most of us have seen her do it before.  She really does inhabit this character and makes it real, and kind of makes you feel sorry for her even though she’s not a very likeable character.  I think it’s always a fascination when people that are super gorgeous let themselves be filmed in less than flattering ways for movies.  She got a lot of attention for that in Monster, where she let herself get fat and icky and practically unrecognizable.  In this one, she still had a slammin’ body and was gorgeous, but had a lot of scenes where she woke up with her makeup all fucked up.  But it’s not all physical with her; she’s also very good.  She doesn’t get naked though, so that’s a bummer.  You see her in her underwear, with some weird kind of strapless bra that seemed to be stuck to her boobs.  Is that a real thing?  ‘Cause it’s icky.  Patton Oswalt is also worth mentioning, because he was very real in his role.  There are similarities to the real Patton (as far as I know him), but he also does a much better job than I would’ve expected from someone who’s primary profession was not acting.  Patrick Wilson was pretty good, but not really the focus of the movie even though he was the driving part of the story.  Elizabeth Reaser and Collette Wolfe only really made an impact because I was trying to figure out where I knew them from, and when I figured out that it was Twilight and Hot Tub Time Machine I stopped paying attention.

This is a movie that I liked in spite of itself, but I can’t imagine that I’ll ever want to watch it again.  The story makes the movie feel pointless, and the main character is mostly unlikeable, but it’s held together by the quality of it’s cast.  I got the movie for a dollar from RedBox, and I don’t regret it, but I also didn’t like the movie nearly enough to purchase it.  My recommendation would be for you to pick it up from the RedBox and find out for yourself.  I don’t imagine anyone would hate the movie, but I could see some people loving it.  Young Adult gets “Sometimes, in order to heal, a few people have to get hurt” out of “We can beat this thing together.”

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Spaced (1999)

The Fuck-est Up-est

I purchased today’s review on DVD based entirely on the people involved with it, even though I knew very little about it beyond that.  I don’t have much experience with British television shows.  I don’t have a problem with them, I just haven’t seen very many of them.  But I decided to purchase the entire series (2 seasons, as we call it over in America) on DVD because I had heard it was enjoyable, and was the genesis of a couple of movies that I loved.  When I got the DVD’s, it took me quite some time to get around to watching them.  But when I saw they were on Netflix streaming, that sealed the deal.  So let’s hear my verdict on the TV show Spaced, created and written by Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson), directed by Edgar Wright, and starring Simon Pegg, Jessica Stevenson, Julia Deakin, Mark Heap, Nick Frost, Katy Carmichael, Ada the Dog, Anna Wilson-Jones, James Lance, Peter Serafinowicz, Michael Smiley, Bill Bailey, Clive Russell, Lucy Akhurst, Reece Shearsmith, with notable cameos by Olivia Williams and Ricky Gervais.

SERIES 1

The basic premise of the show is that two people, aspiring writer Daisy Steiner (Jessica Stevenson) and aspiring comic book artist Tim Bisley (Simon Pegg), have recently become homeless.  They become friends looking through the newspaper for somewhere to live until they eventually find a house that seems perfect, but is only accepting couples.  They develop a plan to pose as a couple in order to get the flat.  They meet with the landlady, Marsha Klein (Julia Deakin), and move in soon after.  They also meet the person living below them, brooding artist Brian Topp (Mark Heap).  When they finally get unpacked, Daisy decides to throw a party, but few people come.  Just Marsha, Brian, Daisy’s friend and fashionista Twist Morgan (Katy Carmichael), and Tim’s friend with aspirations of being in the Territorial Army Mike Watt (Nick Frost).  Also the paperboy.  Later, Daisy fails an interview with a women’s magazine by saying “Girl Power” and Brian gets nervous about going to to meet his former partner Vulva (David Williams).  Vulva acts like a dick to Brain, but Tim gets crazed on a combination of Resident Evil 2, Twiglets, and free boose, punches Vulva, and “rescues” everyone.  Daisy gets dumped by her boyfriend and cheers herself up by getting a dog named Colin (Ada the Dog), but Tim is horribly afraid of dogs.  Tim and Mike go paintballing, only to run into Duane Benzie (Peter Serafinowicz), the man that stole Tim’s girlfriend.  He gets his revenge by shooting Duane in the balls.  Later, Tim is forced to walk Colin and he’s abducted.  Daisy believes he did it on purpose, but he redeems himself by getting the group together for a rescue.  In later episodes, the group goes clubbing with Tim’s friend Tyres (Michael Smiley), then some trouble is stirred up when Tim’s ex wants him back, Daisy fears for him, Brian asks Twist out, Mike rejoins the Territorial Army, and Daisy finally starts writing again.

SERIES 2

Daisy uses the money she made from selling a couple of articles to go on a trip through Asia.  When she returns, Tim is still struggling to get over the pain caused by the release of The Phantom Menace.  Mike has been staying in Daisy’s room in her absence.  Later, Tim is fired from his job at the comics store for yelling at a kid that wants to buy Jar Jar merchandise.  He joins Daisy at the unemployment office to get some money.  Brian finds out that his relationship with Twist has made him happy and, thus, unable to paint.  Marsha’s daughter, Amber, runs away from home, and Mike fills her empty room.  Later, Tim and Mike have their chances of winning Robot Wars damaged by saboteurs, but they’re able to get their robot back on it’s wheels.  Tim is called by Damien Knox of Darkstar Comics, wanting to see his portfolio, but Daisy mistakenly puts a picture Tim drew of Knox saying that he’s “a massive wanker” in the portfolio.  With the help of Tyres, Mike and Tim break into Knox’s office, but the picture was already removed by his secretary, Sophie (Lucy Akhurst), who asks Tim on a date.  Later, Tim and Daisy have a night on the town, but run afoul of a group of ruffians, defeating them with a slow motion shootout with imaginary guns.  When Daisy’s birthday arrives, Sophie is unwittingly driving wedges into the group’s relationships.  Mike is jealous of how much time Tim is spending with someone else, Daisy is a little jealous of Sophie, Marsha thinks Tim is cheating on Daisy because he sees Tim and Sophie together, Brian and Twist break up, and even Colin is upset that Daisy is ignoring him so he goes to spend time with the old lady next door.  Over dinner, the truth comes out that Daisy and Tim were lying all along, and Marsha leaves feeling betrayed.  To tie it all up, Tim and Daisy must find Marsha and try to convince her to come back before she sells the house and leaves them all homeless.

What a surprise, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright did something that I thought was awesome.  Not to leave Jessica Hynes out of it, but this was my introduction to her.  I already had love for Simon, Edgar, and Nick Frost.  Now I guess I have to like all of the rest of these people as well.  This show is really the kind of show for me.  It’s funny, charming, and filled to the brim with references to things I love, from movies to video games and all other things popular culture, if you know to look for them.  The show isn’t what I would call uproariously funny.  It’s just not the type of comedy they were going for.  But it was charming all the way through, and certainly had it’s share of good laughs.  I was thinking about the idea they put out in the show that men can walk up to each other and start a slow motion shootout, and any man would start to play along.  I thought that was ridiculous for a second, but then I realized I would totally play along if it happened to me.  If there’s something negative I could say about the show, it would be that I may have missed some things because I’m not British, and that’s just downright racist of them.  I thought it was interesting that they had a lot of things they could get away with on English television that we definitely couldn’t over here.  They say “fuck” and “asshole” a couple of times, as well “cunt” and “twat”.  Hell, at one point Daisy is trying to get inspiration from magazines and one of them is one called “Huge Fat Cocks”.  They don’t let us get away with stuff like that in this fuckin’ twat of a cuntry.  There’s also a good amount of drug use in the show that wouldn’t fly over here, even though they never really made a big deal out of it on the show.  They smoked weed every now and then, and had an entire episode that was basically devoted to clubbing and ecstasy.  I feel like some of the jokes in that may have gone over my head since I know next to nothing of clubbing or drugs, but I feel I got the spirit of it.  Most of my enjoyment came from recognizing the nerdy things they referenced in the show.  They reference all sorts of things, like The Shining, Scooby Doo, Resident Evil, Star Wars, Robocop, the Matrix, and Star Trek.  They made a joke about Star Trek in the show that was made much funnier after the fact when Simon Pegg said that “Every odd numbered Star Trek film is shit”, not yet knowing that he would be in Star Trek number 11.  I also really liked their Fight Club joke when they were in the Robot Club, ’cause the first rule of Robot Club is you don’t talk about Robot Club.  The second rule of Robot Club is you don’t talk about … wait, I’ve got that wrong.  The second rule is “No Smoking”.

Edgar Wright also filmed the show in the cinematic style that he would later come to perfect, with fast cuts and interesting wipes from scene to scene.  The show’s zombie episode shows signs of Shaun of the Dead being in their minds, and they also use the joke between Pegg and Frost that was used in Shaun, the one where someone says that Frost is on the phone by saying “Your boyfriend’s on the phone” and he responds with “He’s not my boyfriend”, then picks up the phone and says “Hey babe.”

The performances in this show are easily the best part.  Everybody in the cast – both main and supporting – were enjoyable and funny.  Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes were not only the main characters, but the writers of the show, so their the ones that get the most credit for the show’s clever dialogue.  Nick Frost, not surprisingly, was the character I enjoyed the most.  He was all crazy gun nut all the time, especially when he was dual-wielding in the paintball match.  I tended to think Mark Heap’s character was pretty funny too, usually seemingly like he was barely restraining some form of psychosis.  He also introduced the show to Vulva, which lead to a lot of things I though were funny as they kind of lampooned the artsy fartsy stuff I hate by showing the crazy interpretive art of a man dressed like a woman yelling random things on a stage as a guy with a vacuum attached to him jumped around on stage.  That’s basically how I view all of that kind of art.  Julia Deakin made me laugh too.  The big joke about her was that she would drink and smoke semi-constantly, but they got a lot of mileage out of it.  Katy Carmichael’s character Twist was mainly a little stupid and a little bitchy, but she was funny when she was around.  She also had a moment I found really cute when she was trying to talk Tim into letting her take her makeup bag with them on their covert mission to rescue Colin.  My favorite character that wasn’t in the main cast was Michael Smiley as Tyres.  He had a super short attention span as a result of his overuse of ecstasy, and he would talk really fast and start raving whenever things around him made noise to a beat.  One of the things I found funniest in the series was over the credits where it showed him dancing in front of a crosswalk light that was beeping.  I was amused to see Peter Serafinowicz in the show, having already known him from Shaun of the Dead.  That guy’s pretty good at playing a douche nozzle.  I liked a couple of their cameos as well, mostly Olivia Williams playing the part of a cyclist Tim and Mike had hit with their car, an obvious reference to the Sixth Sense that Olivia Williams was actually in.  Ricky Gervais had a small bit part, but it was cool to see him too.

The DVD of the show was an excellent purchase, as I found out after I had fallen in love with the show and started checking out the extras.  There’s a lot of good stuff on these DVD’s.  Unfortunately for me, my disc two DVD would not work, but each disk had some good outtakes, and I love watching them.  If you’re a fan of commentaries (like I am) you can enjoy not only the original commentary track, but ones with other fans of the show like Kevin Smith, Diablo Cody, Matt Stone, Patton Oswalt, Bill Hader, and Quentin Tarantino.  On top of that, there’s a Q&A with the cast, and a feature-length documentary about Spaced that ties up a couple of loose ends left by the show not having a third series.

I seem to have gotten a little long-winded about the show, but I couldn’t help it.  This was a pretty great show.  It’s just the type of show for a nerdy guy like me.  Very funny, very charming, and with tons of references to other nerdy things I love.  Top that off with some great directing and fantastic performances, and this is a show I can fully recommend.  If you’d like to try it out, it’s available on Netflix streaming at the moment.  If you like it, buy it.  The only thing I regretted about my purchase is that my second disc isn’t functioning.  Either way, Spaced gets “It’s a subtle blend of lateral thinking and extreme violence” out of “You’re the best auntie I’ve ever had.”

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Juno (2007)

Pregnancy Can Often Lead to an Infant

I did my best to keep at arm’s length from this movie for no reason other than it seemed artsy and pretentious.  As we know from my review of Rushmore, I don’t like those movies.  The movie getting talked about so much did nothing to make me want to see it before I was reviewing movies, but now that I am it seems like it’s not the wisest stance to not want to see movies because they’re popular.  That being the case, I finally allowed today’s movie to reach the top of my Netflix queue.  This movie stars a lot of people that I’m fond of, but was written by someone I’ve no interest in, so let’s see how it worked out.  Juno was written by – and it pains me to type this – Diablo Cody, directed by Jason Reitman, and starring Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney, Olivia Thirlby, Rainn Wilson, Valerie Tian, Kaaren de Zilva, and Sierra Pitkin.

Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) is a 16-year-old high school student in Minnesota with a bit of a problem on her hands … or, more accurately, in her womb: she’s preggers.  Having decided on a whim to have sex with her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) has left her eating for one more person than she’s used to.  Her original idea is to get an abortion, but she changes her mind once she finds out that her baby has fingernails and the receptionist’s boyfriend’s dick smells like pie.  She joins her friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby) in searching through the Pennysaver to find someone to give the baby to.  She finds Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), and decides they are the perfect couple to give her baby to.  We’ll see how well that works out.  As far as I’ve heard, underage teenage pregnancies tend to work out pretty well.

I’m beginning to wonder about my mood recently, because it seems like it’s been a while since I last watched a movie that I found funny.  The last one was probably Cliffhanger.  Either way, I can’t say that I found this movie that funny, but it did play quirky very well.  The story of the movie was pretty good, but did not have any surprises that I could see.  You know that Juno isn’t going to go for the abortion because that would mean the movie would be pretty well over in the first 15 minutes.  You can easily assume a happy ending to most of these kinds of movie, and you get it here.  It works out mostly like I thought it would.  They throw a couple of speed bumps down along the way for Juno, but nothing too serious until the very end, and even that doesn’t really change the course of the movie.  I did wonder how the adoption thing would turn out, though.  When we first met Mark and Vanessa, it made it a little harder to predict the ending of the movie.  The most obvious happy ending would be that Juno would decide to keep the baby, Bleek would marry her, and then happily ever after … but not for Mark and Vanessa.  That’s not the way they went, but they did tie it up to be a pretty happy ending for everyone.  I had problems with the dialogue, though.  It really got on my nerves in parts.  Maybe Diablo Cody and her friends would confront a 16 year old pregnant girl with a phrase like “That’s one doodle that can’t be undid, home skillet”, but most people would think it in poor taste and worse vernacular.  I certainly wouldn’t spend any time around someone that would say that.  I like Ned Flanders too, but I don’t talk like him.  They said more of these stupid little sayings in the beginning, but it was greatly toned down by the end, to the movie’s benefit.  The look of the movie was also interesting, usually being pretty colorful and with tons of little knick-knacks around the sets for the audience to look at.  I particularly liked the opening credit scene that seemed mostly hand drawn.  It was a nice look, but it made me think that whoever was responsible desperately wants to be Wes Anderson, and I don’t use that as a compliment.  I would generally think something along the lines of “take your shitty, pretentious bullshit elsewhere and make a movie”, but it was toned down to a level that wouldn’t annoy me for this movie, and I appreciated that.

The cast was all fantastic, but the characters were sometimes written in a way that made them tedious.  But you can’t really blame that on the actors.  I always like Ellen Page.  She usually gives very real performances, and this movie also shows that she can pull some funny along with the tears I’ve seen her pull before.  I did find Juno herself a little irritating at times.  I understand that she was playing a 16-year-old, but she seemed really stupid at times.  Her first conversation with Mark and Vanessa particularly, where she took “How far along” to mean “In school” and not in the pregnancy that was causing them all to meet, was cute.  I was also particularly annoyed with her misinterpretation of Greek and Roman mythology, but I blame this mainly on a certain stripper-turned-writer.  Juno claimed that her name was not from the city in Alaska, but from the Greek god that was married to Zeus.  WRONG!  Juno is the ROMAN name for the goddess Hera.  Hera was married to Zeus, but if you’re talking about the Roman versions of the gods, Juno was married to Jupiter.  I didn’t research that shit, so if you did to name your character, you should be embarrassed.  It also never made sense to me that Juno had such a hard time understanding what “sexually active” meant.  It means you are active sexually.  Not much more needed than that.  Michael Cera was a pretty small part of the movie, and he didn’t really do a lot of work in the parts he was in.  The character he plays (and seemingly the character that Michael Cera actually is) is not a very emotional person, so it’s understandable that he never had any really big freak out moments.  At the end, I did find out that Cera has a really bad singing voice.  Ellen’s was fine.  Jason Bateman was a good character in the movie, but I didn’t really appreciate the hints of his attraction to 16-year-old Juno.  If you’re going down that path, do it and get some story out of it.  But if you’re only going to hint at it and have them dance and get awkward, don’t even bother.  I’m not usually a Jennifer Garner fan (because I’ve seen Daredevil and Elektra) but I liked her in this movie.  She was mostly fairly cold and distant, but she has a couple of really good emotional scenes and seemed very real in them.  J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney were also very good as Juno’s parents, and I especially liked Allison Janney when she laid down a real classy verbal beatdown on the ultrasound technician.  I felt like they missed a good joke opportunity with Simmons, though.  Early on, he claims that he’ll punch Bleek in the dick if he sees him.  By the end, when he does see him again, he just walks on by.  That would have been a fantastic addition.

The charm of this movie elevates it higher than the somewhat predictable story and some of the poor dialogue would normally have made it.  Some of the charm comes from the writing, but I feel like the greater majority of it is from the fantastic cast.  In the end, I found myself to be much more fond of this movie than I had expected I would be going in (especially going in having already seen Jennifer’s Body), but I can’t say that I ever found it “funny”.  Then again, I may be comedically broken.  I haven’t a clue where I left my sense of humor, but I’ll get back to you.  Either way, Juno is at least worth a rental, if not a full purchase.  Juno gets “I’m already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?” out of “Honest to blog?”

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