The best movie I've seen in a long time

Rating: 10/10 (18 February 2008)

"Juno" is about many things: love, need, integrity, commitment, family, parenthood, sex, oh and a tiny 16 year old girl who finds herself pregnant in small town America.
If Ken Loach had made this kind of movie, I'd have been slitting my wrists by the 22nd minute, consumed with angst and the inevitable bleakness of the human condition.
But this is written by a woman who christened herself Diablo Cody and who manages her image like a Letterman monologue (she worked as stripper in preference to her job at an ad agency and has two wonderful quotes about writing and writers: Stripping toughened my hide, but exposing myself as a writer has been a lot more brutal.
I have never been an ambitious person, and my participation in this industry is a fluke, but only male writers can afford to be coy and self-deprecating.) so it is hip without being glib and optimistic without being candy-coated.
Just reading the script for this movie would have lightened my heart and stretched my smile but the movie adds indie music, cool animation, perfect timing, and an ensemble cast that take no prisoners.
And then there's Ellen Page. I'm more than a little in love with Ellen Page. She knows how to sell an emotion with small changes to her facial expression but she never seems to let technique get in the way of emotional honesty. Page is small, with a large head and a wide mouth and eyes that take in the whole world. She looks 16 (she was 20 when the movie was made) and, although she is brave and independent and almost compulsively witty, she carries across that only-partly-formed-and-still-very-vulnerable state that makes being a teenager so emotion soaked.
I first saw her last year in "Hard Candy" where she plays a 14 year old who thinks she encountered a internet predator and sets out to deal with him. I switched the movie off, not because it was bad but because it was so raw I couldn't cope with it.
I hope the movies does well at the Oscars. I wish Cody Diablo well with her up and coming "United States of Tara" series and I am absolutely certain that I will see every film that Elen Page takes part in.