Juno. But not like the city, get it?

“This is no laughing matter!”

–Mac MacGuff (Juno’s father) failing to keep his own sense of laughter in check.

Oh, but isn’t it!

I recently had the chance to watch Juno, this season’s hippest, most “it rocks” movie (especially here on the Internet). The film, another masterpiece of the emerging Cinema Ironia, takes place on whatever planet the films of Wes Anderson and his various followers takes place on: A land where the suburban streets are slightly bleaker than you remember them being and everything is drowned in the ironic sounds of neo-folk Dylan-ish music.

In the movie’s first scenes, it is quickly established that Juno, the ironically named (I guess) sixteen year old title character is pregnant. She doesn’t seem particularly bothered by this fact, nor do many of the people around her, which left me wondering during the first half-hour exactly why the film needed to be made in the first place. In fact, nothing seems to bother this girl, nothing that she can’t rub off with a cynicism that I believe it would take at-least another decade on this earth to acquire. But if, unlike myself and and everyone I’ve ever known, her adolescence is really a time of remarkable self-assuredness, I can only wonder why she got herself knocked-up by the nerdy kid next door.

Of course, she first goes to get an abortion, where she’s greeted by a single Christian protester, a silly Asian girl who she knows from school. No pro-lifer here, but I was amused that the most ridiculous character in this movie was the one who actually believed in something. Despite her being dismissive of the girl’s rhetoric, our hero decides against terminating the pregnancy because, essentially, the clinic “smells like a dentist office”.

So, next we answer an ad in the paper from a young disgustingly-domicile couple looking to adopt a child. Now here’s where I brace myself (and grin). The whole film is going to be saved by a middle class generational brawl that American Cinema is desperately in need of, right! Wrong. To my chagrin, the meeting between disaffected, but yuppified and resigned Gen Xers and Uber-disaffected Gen Yers once more delineates into the tired scenes of comparing esoteric tastes in shitty music and bloody films. Juno and the husband trade CDs, pit Gordon Lewis against Argento, discuss the ‘rawness’ of Iggy Pop and Sonic Youth, while the film-makers promise “trust us, this means something”. Meanwhile the young wife, who is perhaps the only recognizable character in the film and certainly the most sympathetic, spends her time worrying and confused, terrified that the rather modest goals she’s set for her life may somehow not work out, almost like a real human being, it seems only she hasn’t been told how the movie is going to end.

Eventually, it turns out that the pregnancy has only been the film’s sideshow. In fact, this whole time we were watching a love story between Juno and the dork who had sex with her, neither of which, again, seemed particularly changed by what’s happened. Oh, something has changed between them, we’re just never let in on what it was. The ending hints that it’s simply a return to normalcy, but I wasn’t aware that we had ever left it, at-least in terms of what this film wants (needs) us to believe is normal.

Did I enjoy Juno? Not Particularly. Would I recommend you see it? Absolutely! For the same reason I’d recommend you go see your local indie rocker croon about problems he’s never had and read the latest young novelist devote 400 pages to the ‘nature of celebrity’: It’s the only game in town. This is, sadly, American Cinema (and culture) at it’s current finest. We’re too repressed to even talk about how repressed we are without periodically reminding the viewer that it’s just a joke. Personally, I’m fine with it as long as the DVD includes a feature where I can shut off that awful music.