Let there be a Juno backlash, and let it begin with Modern Fabulosity. And let it continue with Craig Kennedy: “Some folks are even looking at this as being an Oscar contender. I don’t think it is, but when I’m ultimately proven wrong I’ll be the first to admit it. Of course, if I’m right I’ll be shouting it from the rooftops.” Finally, at Reverse Shot, Elbert Ventura concedes that Fox Searchlight has found “this year’s Little Miss Sunshine“–which should not, under any circumstances, be considered a compliment.
The Reeler talks to Jennifer Venditti about Billy the Kid and, most interestingly, the subject’s complicity in its construction: “He met Heather, and after that he would come up to me on the way home and say, ‘I think tomorrow we should do a scene where we’re holding hands walking down the street.’ Of course we didn’t do those things, but he was going with it in his head and getting into it.”
Both Alan at Burbanked and Chris at Movie Marketing Madness have complaints about the new one sheet for Be Kind Rewind. I hate to say it, but their fears were confirmed by a friend of SpoutBlog, who called with a four word review on his way out of a Rewind press screening this afternoon: “It sucked my ass.”
The Playlist passes along word that Sonic Youth’s cover of The Carpenters’ “Superstar” has made it onto the Juno soundtrack album. The song plays a key role in my favorite part of the film, the friendship between Ellen Page’s pregnant teen and Jason Bateman’s 30-something would-be adoptive father, through which Juno learns perhaps the most important lesson of being a wise-beyond-your-years teenage girl: you can only be precocious and adorable and interested in some older dude’s past life as a minor rock star for so long before said older dude starts getting That Look in his eyes every time you come ’round.
Still, it seems a *little* weird that a song that was originally recorded for a compilation disc would now end up on another compilation disc. Or maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. The whole point of this post was to have an excuse to embed Dave Markey’s video for the song, which I love, and have loved since I was Juno’s age.
Paul on A Woman in the Dunes: “It seems the premise of a man trapped, living in poverty against his will with a cruel and unusual brood of villagers in control would make for a downer of a flick. But I found Woman to be as much ecclesiastical as it is existential.”
Via Filmmaker comes word that director Bruce McDonald is asking the online masses to recut his latest film, The Tracey Fragments. He’s posted all of the film’s raw footage, including the score by Broken Social Scene, on the film’s website, and is inviting anyone who wishes to download the materials and cut them into music videos, trailers, or full re-edits of the film. Canadian residents can then submit their videos through the same website, and a winner selected by McDonald will receive a Final Cut Pro pirze package, and will have their cut included on the film’s DVD.
The Tracey Fragments is on my short list of films that I’m dying to see right now, and I keep missing my chance. It stars Ellen Page as a 15 year-old girl in search of her lost little brother, and the story is presented in an almost-constant, ever-changing split screen. I missed Tracey at the Toronto Film Festival but have heard nothing but good things from people who saw it there and in Berlin. I was hoping to catch it in Denver, but it turns out I won’t be arriving in town until after it screens. It’s opening in Canada this week, but as far as I know it still doesn’t have US distribution. I’m hoping Ellen Page’s impending uber-hotness will provide a domestic distributor the impetus to pick it up. In the meantime, I’m downloading the footage just to get a peak.
Now that Juno has won a big festival prize and Fox Searchlight has revamped its release plan to make the teen sex melocomedy look more like a prestige picture, various bloggers are have begun to seriously consider the film’s Oscar chances. I still think Searchlight would be better off selling this movie to teenagers than to the Academy dinosaurs, but if everyone else is doing it, I’ll play along.
I’m sure Searchlight will push for nominations for screenwriter Diablo Cody and lead actress Ellen Page. I think both pieces of work are sufficiently spectacular (in multiple senses of the word) to secure a nod, but despite the Academy’s love of ingenues, I think when it comes down to vote time the general consensus will that both will do better work once their talents mature a bit. This must be what everyone else is thinking, too, because out of nowhere, people are starting to talk (see the comments on this post) about Jennifer Garner’s work as the title character’s would-be adoptive baby mama as worthy of a Best Supporting Actress nomination. It’s not–which doesn’t mean it won’t get nominated, but I think that would be serious over-praise. It’s not bad work by any means, but there are at least three finer performances in that movie.
Searchlight probably doesn’t have the guts to push Jason Bateman for Best Supporting Actor, but man, I’d like to see them try. He’s absolutely the catalyst for everything Garner does, as well as much of Page’s performance in the film’s middle section. He transforms from the heroine’s confidant to, essentially, the film’s villain in the space of a single scene. And we’ve never seen subtlety like this from Bateman before. Even fans of his straight-man work in Arrested Development should be impressed. The big story of 2007 will be the emergence of the comedy with unexpected depth (it’s actually a throwback to the 30s, but that’s a discussion for another time). The performances of Bateman, Page and Michael Cera in Juno embody that theme, and deserve to be recognized as such.
A side note: Searchlight’s sudden post-fall festival focus on Juno must suck for the team behind Waitress. Certainly, no one could be mad that a film made for about a million dollars has grossed $20 million, but back in June, Keri Russell looked like a lock for a Best Actress nomination. Now … she doesn’t.
According to a press release sent via email by a Fox Searchlight publicist, the Juno release plan has been tweaked. Instead of rolling out wide on December 14, the film will now open in New York and L.A. on Wednesday, December 5 and roll out slowly after that. Seems significant: after all, Searchlight could easily have sold this thing as Superbad 2: The Taming of the Porksword. It looks to me like a “let’s take advantage of critical interest in our hot young stars and screenwriter right before Oscar time” move if I’ve ever seen one. But I don’t know if have, so take my take with a grain of salt.
The surprise hit of the Telluride Film Festival, Juno is not quite the unqualified masterpiece that the breathless buzz might lead you to believe: its high-concept slanguage sometimes feels over-written, its visual style can get a bit too twee, and there are two or three bridge scenes in the third act that feel like imports from a much stupider movie. But in a year heavy on halfway-decent studio-supported sex comedies, Juno stands out for successfully plumbing the subversively bittersweet depths that Knocked Upstrove for but mostly missed. It’s a crowd pleaser, it’s a tear jerker, and even if it doesn’t completely reinvent the genre, it does move a few fairly familiar sitcomish situations in exciting directions.
Juno’s one truly revelatory element stems from screenwriter Diablo Cody’s apparent intention to have her title character serve, at least in part, as a device through which to examine the sexual desires of teenage girls. Juno (played by Ellen Page) is a boyish, foul-mouthed, kitsch-steeped, irony-packing, hoodie-wearing, Iggy Pop-worshiping smart-ass. She’s savvy enough to understand that the bully who mocks her does so to disguise his crush, but she lacks the self-awareness to truly comprehend her power over men and boys.
In a burst of genuine passion disguised as boredom, Juno swaps virginities with her best friend Bleeker, a lithe, brainy track star played by Michael Cera. We see their single sexual encounter through Juno’s gaze, in brief, golden-hued flashbacks which allude to Juno’s deeper feelings, but when the teenager discovers she’s pregnant, she knee-jerk plays it cool. She arranges to give the baby up for adoption to a couple of grunge-nostalgic yuppies (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), and almost unwittingly distances herself from Bleeker the baby daddy. A horribly inappropriate love triangle ensues.
Let there be a 
