Yeah, right

Rating: 2/10 (17 April 2008)

This is one VERY overrated movie, sorry. The extent of praise and showers of awards it received is mind-boggling. I apologize, but part of being a teenager is not always knowing what to say, not always being able to find the right words. Yet after 5 minutes it was painfully clear that Ellen Page would be playing the hyper-articulate card ala Gilmore Girls for the next 90 minutes. Who the hell talks like this? Perhaps the movie makers intended to highlight the character of Juno as some rarified teen exception-to-the-rule. Didn't buy it for a minute, sorry. Giant bogus hipster namedropping fantasy. Apparently Ellen Page already has another new movie out in which she portrays another precocious, acerbic teen. That means she gets just one more movie to do something else before I write her off completely (3 strikes). So she carefully recites calculated, manipulative dialogue (which I guess deserves one star). But so what? This is no slice-of-life realism, which ostensibly it is trying to be. In fact, it tries so hard that Jason Bateman, Rainn Wilson and Jennifer Garner are all uselessly cast in the shadow of its mass pretense.