Cultural Dessert

'Juno'

11 February 2008

I used to love watching 'Hill Street Blues' but it usually took me up to the first ad-break to tune into what they were saying - I found the fast, cross-talking, American accents extremely hard to follow. I felt a bit the same on Sunday watching 'Juno' - the new Canadian comedy film directed by Jason Reitman. The universal language of the North American teenager with its rapid mumbling appears, like, totally incomprehensible, dude. But it was well worth sticking with it and tuning into the dialogue because the script, by Diablo Cody, is one of the wittiest I've come across in a long time. Juno is a 16-year old schoolgirl - a bravura performance by Ellen Page - who decides to see through her accidental pregnancy and to allow her baby to be adopted by a childless couple. Not to be confused with other lesser recent films on the unwanted pregnancy theme, 'Juno' is charming, quirky, witty and strangely beautiful. All the main characters are well-drawn, well-acted and sympathetic. It's an extremely funny and poignant film. 'Juno' has been much praised and received several five star reviews (maybe slightly over generous but it's definitely worth at least four stars) so we were surprised to find that, just two days after it was released, we had the whole cinema to ourselves at the early evening showing on Sunday - though perhaps this says more about the Odeon in Milton Keynes than the film. At least the audience was remarkably well-behaved!

Labels: Film

posted by Robin Simpson @ 11:22 am