Juno is the story of a pregnant 16 year and how she deals with it with wit and wisdom. Juno reminds me of a long episode of The Gilmore Girls. Juno is filled with brilliant dialogue that no high school kids could ever come up with and way cool adults who like nothing more than hanging out with high school kids. There are also a lot of odd little details such as a phone shaped like a hamburger and Juno’s fondness for stripes.
I knew nothing about Juno before I saw it, other than it was about a pregnant high school girl who seemed to do nothing but crack a lot of jokes. The big surprise for me was seeing Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. These two sort-of-big-stars/sort-of-already-has-beens play the parts of the adoptive parents for Juno’s unwanted baby. They are not a perfect couple, but then, no one is perfect in Juno’s world.
The music in Juno must have been chosen for it’s cute and quirky quality, though I found most of it to be just weird and annoying. Offbeat and kind of out of step with everything, the music was one of those knock you back to reality things like the ongoing voice overs that remind you, hey, this is a movie being clever, aren’t we clever?
Maybe I was just in the wrong mood when I watched Juno, but I didn’t find the story of a 16 year going through pregnancy and giving her baby away to be all that funny. The endless smartass remarks didn’t seem funny; for the most part, they just seemed desperate or the logical thing to say.
Juno was still a good movie and I especially liked the father, played by J.K Simmons who did a brilliant job of playing J. Jonah Jameson in the Spiderman movies. Juno’s dad took his daughter’s pregnancy in stride and was most often seen working on some bit of machinery while he chatted with Juno about this and that. The rest of the cast was pretty good as well.
Juno treats teen pregnancy as just one more thing to get done in high school, like her chemistry test or finding a date for the prom. Nothing serious and nothing that really matter. Trying to become a rock star-that matters and that’s where Juno ends. Juno and her boyfriend are singing the horrible songs we have been hearing and looking forward to hitting the big time. That whole teen pregnancy thing? Forget about it.
