...MY FIRST HOLIDAY MOVIE...another mainstream, slacker/teenage/nerdy, very pro-life, very pro-family movie. Very smart and very funny, and realistic without being trashy. The script and acting are good enough (unlike those of KNOCKED UP) actually to win awards. The semi-indy music of today used to good effect and quite melodically throughout. Does more than Gerson to restore my faith in today’s young people. I would say more, but I don’t want to ruin it for you!
Peter, I have not seen Juno, but why is Knocked Up so horrible?
This movie told a story of a couple, who in drunkeness, made a baby. But unlike most tales, this couple made the baby through to the end. The girl and the guy--as unrealistic of a couple as they make--try to make the most of the situation.
And the movie hints at the possibility that the girl and the guy may love each other and thereby provide a good home for their child. They certainly have some support in the sibling family.
To be sure, the parents of the protagonists are flaky on both sides, but this should be a further commendation for this couple's decision to continue.
Yes, the fact that there was no marriage is troubling. But I would say--given the genre--marriage is not far from the picture. In the movie, the guy asks the girl to marry him. This movie is not immune to the idea of providing form to love and family.
To be sure it is not your normal love story. As someone who grew up in the PC/feminist/SNAG 1980s, it was a pleasure to see a movie that ended with the girl and the guy trying to make some sense of their life together.
John, As I said before, I liked KUed a lot, but it's not a great work of art.
My 18 year old son went to see this movie last night, Christmas, and said the movie was so intense he could not stay until the end. He went with a buddy who was meeting a girl at the theater and needed help. They said that by the birth of the baby, girls all around them in the movie theater were sobbing. If the movie had not been cathartic enough, the weeping women and the intensity of the emotion surrounding drove him out of the room. The movie touched him, but it moved them. A theater full of girls crying was too much to bear.
Not your normal love story. I would say not.
Kate, Thanks, although I'm not at all sure that much crying occurs at most showings. The most moving movie of the year is also the most witty. You gotta see it.
The movie is a of epic porportions by an heroine who despite her very mortal limitations lives up to her name. Juno, to begin with, is just a great name, and the film brings out the greatness in the ordinary.
I do mean to go see that movie, especially after what my son told me. On Christmas, at the late showing, the theater had to be all teens and young adults. I wondered how many of those were young women who had aborted their children, given abortion statistics for that age group. My boy's description of the room was as if there were a deep fog of grief and remorse - if one started weeping, would all succumb?
My youngest, a nearly 15 year old daughter, wants me to take her to see Juno. I hope I get a theater full of what my son fled for her experience of the movie. At every Christmas gathering this has been the movie everyone has wanted to see. Still, even if it is very funny, too, this seems like a very odd holiday movie. What a place, this America.