Attention Amateur Script-Writers With No Talent - THERE IS STILL HOPE FOR SUCCESS

Rating: 1/10 (22 December 2007)

A movie like this is hard to review. On one hand, I can disparage an entire audience for liking this movie for reasons that are well beyond my means of comprehension. On the other hand, well, I can lie through my teeth. The truth is, I feel seasoned enough with the silver-screen to know what makes a movie great. And what you might ask makes a movie great? Performances, story-line, the dialogue and script, and the deliverance of each of these are some aspects among many that make a great movie. A low budget movie can have all of these dynamics sharpened to perfection and will stand out with crowds and is something that has been seen before in other independent movies such as Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite. From what I've heard and what I know, it is my understanding that Juno had a large PR budget which aided it in reaching out to it's appropriate audience, and lo and behold the power of the mighty PR; a multitude of positive reviews for this movie that range from the well-respected opinion's of movie critics such as Roger Ebert to the every day movie-goer who gave it a standing ovation the second the credits rolled. Juno received anything but a standing ovation from me. The performance was not what bothered me, all the actor's and actresses worked well with what they had, which without regard did very little to satisfy me. What bothered me was the shockingly horrifying attempt at professional script writing by the movie's stripper-turned-journalist, Diablo Cody. From what I hear, she's a journalistic hipster exhalted by Minneapolis Newspapers and Minneapolis audiences alike, and the dialogue in Juno's script was evidence of her catastrophically crash-and-burned attempt at emulating the whopping success of the sharp and heavily wit-worded WB shows made famous by the late Gilmore Girls. I was not impressed and anybody who was apparently has not seen Gilmore Girls, and that includes Roger Ebert who's on-the-cover excerpt from his review of the movie declares the dialogue to be quick and funny, which it is neither of those two things. The so-so story line had it's needed zig-zags to prevent a movie about teen pregnancy from emanating the feeling that you've been watching the 90 minute movie for the whole nine months, but the zig-zags were at times trite and scatterbrained. A few of the events in the movie made one wonder why that was even bothered with in the first place. Several scenes in the movie seemed to produce a sense of possible excitement to the story-line that only ended up falling short and thus producing little other than a disappointing outcome. With as many fans as this movie has somehow formed, I still have to recommend a pass for this movie. Save your money and save your time, which are two things that this movie completely robs you of. Sometimes a well-done performance, such as those done by Ellen Page and Jennifer Garner, are not nearly enough to save a movie that attempts to appeal to Napoleon Dynamite/Hot Topic type audiences and furthermore delivers a quality-lacking script that falls far short of creating the intended quick and witty hipster wannabe dialogue that only exposes the writer as a pretentious amateur who should stick to robbing lonely, inebriated men with lap dances in the VIP room than innocent movie goers who were fooled by a large PR budget and a potentially charming story-line, which might I add, went terribly awry for scattered periods of time during this film. I will leave this review with one final note - if Amy Sherman-Palladino had anything to do with this script, it would have made a world of difference and likely would have been more than enough to change my opinion, as it would have delivered the correct wording that I believe Diablo Cody was looking for.