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Under discussion:

Juno  (2007)

What is it with all these baby movies all of a sudden? Between Knocked Up and Waitress, we’ve seen both male and female perspectives on pregnancy. August Rush is looking for his parents who don’t even know he exists (I’m not kidding). And now we have the best baby film this year in Juno, director Jason Reitman’s sophomore film after his amazing Thank You For Smoking. This time, he’s gone from razor-sharp satire to razor-sharp coming of age story with one of cinema’s most charismatic heroines in recent history with the only actress who could pull this part off.

That character’s name is Juno MacGuff and she is played by Ellen Page, most notably seen in 2005's Hard Candy. She’s sixteen, quick-witted, and just found out she’s pregnant. The boy involved (I won’t say he did it to her since we find out quickly she initiated) is the shy but cute Paulie Bleaker (Michael Cera). He’s a track runner in school who has two vices: Juno and orange Tic-Tacs. When she finds out, her first thought is abortion, but a combination of pie-flavored condoms and baby’s fingernails force her to back out (you have to see it to believe it). But now the real problem begins: what to do with the baby?
 And like the I-Ching it is, the answer lies in the Penny-Saver. Juno finds an ad for a couple looking for a child to adopt. She tells her father and stepmother (The irreplaceable J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney), who takes the matter seriously, but they also take it in stride (“You’ll know I’ll stand beside through anything…apparently.”). Juno assures them she has found a solution.

They are Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), a well-to-do couple who lives in a suburb where Vanessa has been dedicating preparing the perfect house for a new child. Mark constantly looks as though the word baby would devour him whole. When Juno enters into the equation, she finds a kindred spirit in Mark, who used to be a rocker but now composes commercials. They argue about music and horror movies. We can tell that Juno is being irresponsible towards the couple and Mark is starting to crack under the pressure of the idea of being a father.

The film is devilishly inventive, incredibly smart, and strikingly original. Pregnancy movies usually revolve around the couple growing up. But Juno is not keeping the baby and the film never makes the mistake of making this a decision. But in her situation, her ideas of relationships are challenged and mended. We are seeing everything from Juno’s obscured perspective, giving everything a sharper edge to it. A great scene to see this is when she notices the track boys running by. Yes, it is crude, but that’s Juno. She narrates, but not in the usual sense. We are in her mind, so we’re going to hear her thoughts about the events going on.

A lot of credit must go to first-time scribe Diablo Cody, whose characters are memorable in their plainness. Her dialogue is sharp yet heartfelt. We don’t laugh at characters, but with them. There’s no villains here, no obligatory scenes for the sake of following a formula. Characters are very complex. None other than Juno herself, who is both incredibly smart incredibly stupid at the same time. But I also love how the screenplay respects the supporting characters, allowing them to be honest and real. Yes the dialogue is snappy, but remember that we’re seeing everything from Juno’s perspective and how she hears people talk. Ms. Cody’s screenplay has Oscar written all over it.

But the words can only be brought to harmony with the right actors in the parts. And this film is cast superbly. I just love watching JK Simmons and Allison Janney as Juno’s parents. The tiny mannerisms that Ms. Janney brings when she’s happy or upset that complete what the dialogue starts. Simmons, who was also in Director Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking, again does his rapid-fire, scene-stealing thing that feels like improv, only better. Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner give their best film performance to date as a couple that seems perfect until you start digging a little deeper. Bateman, who is a master at the understatement, uses that to make his character. Garner goes completely against type in playing the guarded perfectionist Vanessa. Michael Cera again plays the shy sweet guy that’s becoming his foray, but this time he puts in a deeper reserve of yearning that isn’t very noticeable but in a few scenes but you can tell they’ve always been there. But the performance to beat this Oscar season is Ellen Page. This complex character in a sea of complex characters is the reason to see this amazing film, and Ms. Page really pulls off the best performance I have seen this year.

Jason Reitman in only two films has shown to be a better filmmaker than his father, the legendary Ivan Reitman of Ghostbusters fame. He allows his characters to be complex and real, not playing towards the laughs but allows the comedy to find it’s way to the story. His film feels independent, which is what this film needed. Reitman’s skill isn’t in amazing shots, but in pacing, structure and getting unforgettable performances out of his actors. And in only that do I feel that he’s going to have a long and fruitful career.

All in all, I love this film, but could I not? And I would have to ask the same of anybody who has also seen it. And who would have thought that a film about an unplanned teenage pregnancy would not only make you feel good coming out, but to make you think about the value of friends, family, and life? To know Juno McGraw is to love her. I implore everybody I can; meet Juno McGraw.

Under discussion:

Stephen King's The Mist  (2007)

Five minutes can change everything, especially in how you see a film. This is doubly the case when it comes to the ending. Sometimes it’s intended (The Sixth Sense), sometimes not so much (Manhattan). Looking back at The Mist, the last five minutes is what I think about, and not for good reasons. And it will be these five minutes that most of my review is going to be talking about. I’ll try not to spoil it intentionally, but I cannot make any promises.

The Mist is the third Stephen King adaptation by director Frank Darabont, who’s The Green Mile is a small classic and his The Shawshank Redemption is a mega classic. This time, he turns to one of King’s oldest novellas about a group of Maine townspeople who get cornered into a supermarket by an unnatural mist. The story focuses on David Drayton (Thomas Jane), an artist who comes to town with his small son and is trapped in the store when sirens go off and a bloodied townsfolk scream about something in the mist and the sounds of screams outside encourage that idea. Later, when a really stupid idea by a couple of the townies brings about a monster attack, this intensifies the fears going through their heads and they start forming their own little groups. One small band led by a big city judge (Andre Braugher) ignores the screams and the blood and insists that there’s nothing outside and wants to leave. Another lead by the local religious freak Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), believes this the sign of the Apocalypse and that God wants blood. When Drayton decides that he and a handful of people might need to leave, they soon learn that there might be more to worry about than the creatures outside.

The question the movie ultimately asks is who is the more dangerous species: the one inside or outside the store? It also is a look on the ways fear plays upon mankind and the psychology of fear. We can tell that Mrs. Carmody was off her rocker before the world ended, but the easy answers and lack of need to do anything about it makes what she believes very appealing to those who care not to seek a plan. Drayton might be the voice of reason, but to most who are facing imminent death, reason doesn’t have the same value. These are the key elements to the original King story that correctly sees the mist not as the enemy but the situation to test man’s soul. Darabont, when evoking King’s work, is doing the same thing. These elements are fascinating, even chilling. Darabont correctly makes the monsters indifferent to humans (though they do enjoy eating them, of course).

The ultimate problem is the ending. To end his version of the story, he does a complete 180 from the original story, which I would only be mildly upset about if it weren’t for the fact that looking back at the rest of the movie, it defeats the whole intent of the story. ***Spoiler Alert*** King’s ending eluded that the fate of his characters was not certain, but that they held on the belief of hope. The film decides to give a definite answer, and betrays how the characters would actually act. Why did the filmmaker make this decision at the end? He’s made a case against hope against uncertainly, almost siding with the film’s villain for that matter. It certainly wasn’t done for the sake of making the audience happier. There are only two answers that make any sense. The first was that he wanted to shock the audience with an ending they weren’t ready for, but at the expense of destroying the tone of his movie. The second one is more childish, but makes more sense. Darabont’s last film, The Majestic, was a great film in the spirit of a Frank Capra heartstring-tugger. It was a beautiful film that nobody saw, that most of the critics panned as being sappy. It makes me wonder if he’s decided to punish his audience. Many people might argue that this version of the film is a cautionary tale, but that doesn’t explain how you have your decent character going through all those trials and tribulations only to get to the point he does in the last five minutes.

Okay, the spoilers are over. But even without the ending, this is a mild film all the way around. The monsters look like bad CG, the acting isn’t anything to write home about (even Ms. Harden pushed her character a little too far for me to truly find interesting. And visually speaking, mist doesn’t leave much to look at. And yet I was pulled into the story, it’s characters, and their fates. Again, this is more a testament to King’s story than Darabont’s film.

All in all, I really hate this film because five minutes told me more than I wanted or needed to know. It told me that hope is futile and that those who do should be punished. It told me that the filmmaker didn’t believe in his characters from the first minute on the screen. It told me that you have to punish the good as much as you punish the bad. In the end, I just wanted it to be a really bad dream that I can forget in the morning. Such a waste of great material.

Under discussion:

Into the Wild  (2007)

If I have a son some day and he turns 18, two of his gifts would be Thoreau’s Walden and Kerouac’s On The Road. In my opinion, every boy on the cusp of manhood needs to read these two books to broaden their sense of the world and to inspire them to let their imagination guide them. Perhaps on that same list should also be Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild as a cautionary tale of sorts. But I must wonder what Sean Penn saw in the material when he initially wanted to turn this bestseller into a movie. What did he see in its protagonist and what did he believe was the meaning of his doomed journey?

Sean Penn’s Into The Wild is arguably one of the best worst movies I have seen this year. It’s the true-life story of Christopher McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch), a 23-year-old college graduate on the fast track to Harvard Law School who after graduation gives away all his earthly possessions except his car and a stash of books, his money, and destroys his Ids and stars heading north to Alaska. He changes his name to Alex Supertramp and starts hiking it after his car gets slammed during a flash flood. He meets interesting people along the way like a hippie couple (Brian Dierker and Catherine Keener), a South Dakota grain farmer (Vince Vaughn), and eventually a lonely old leather smith (Hal Holbrook). They all are intrigued by the boy and his single-minded quest for Alaska (which we know he makes it since it’s the first thing we see). They also try to discourage him from going, try to get him to call his parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden), and maybe because they know something about reality that he is romanticizing.

So why do I not like this movie? It’s not in the content that is my displeasure but in the presentation. Penn’s film is aggravatingly vane and self-aggrandizing. First, there’s his use of trick shots that look cool, but only for the sake of looking cool. They have no place in a film like this. There are even times that he has characters breaking the fourth wall (looking into the camera on purpose) that makes no sense whatsoever. This film even sports the worst title cards in the history of the movies, I kid you not! When you see the title imposed on the screen, don’t deny that you want to roll your eyes. It’s almost like Penn is trying to come across this material as an auteur instead of as a storyteller. The problem is that when he does these trick shots, it comes about Penn instead of his subject. 

And then there’s the structure of the film. It starts off with Chris in Alaska in what might be considered the halfway point to his journey (and the end of the most interesting part of it). We are taken back to the beginning of his journey in flashback while cutting back to Alaska at points. What is the purpose in filming it like this? The reason is simple; Most of the Alaskan parts of the film have Chris pretty much alone, prancing around (I’m not kidding) when he isn’t reading or hunting. In short, Penn sees the Alaskan part to be dead space that needs to be filled with something until he can get around to the tragic ending. And then there are the two voiceovers. There is Chris’, which we expect and accept, but then there’s also Chris’ sister (Jena Malone), whom literally does nothing else in the movie but provide this voiceover. Even when we are taken back to the parents, she is rarely seen, as though her story is only to tell Chris’. This second voiceover is also pointless since what she talks about is ultimately a speculation for the reasons Chris left. Why couldn’t the film leave the why up to the audience? All the really matters is that Chris has left, hurting pretty much anybody who cared for him all in the sake of a personal journey that was naïve at best, stupid at worst.

There film could be considered hypercritical, considering that the film is supposedly trying not to pass judgment on Chris, but seems to indict his family for being materialistic and shallow. Most of the characters are well rounded, except for Chris and his family. Chris can’t be well rounded since he’s obsessed with his quest. But the film decided to make him a messiah of sorts, spouting off well-articulated defenses to his quest against those who wish for him to stop. Most do so because they like him and almost want his to stay with them. They either want to adopt him or marry him. It is in these supporting performances that the film is as it’s best. Two of the best are Catherine Keener and Hal Holbrook, both of which I will be supportive of during the Oscar race. But it is in Holbrook that I almost want him to win. This is his finest hour in a career of fine hours. He gives us a character that we like because he’s the kind of father that Chris needs (or that the film argues such a case anyways). While the Chris character isn’t well rounded, Emile Hirsch does his best to make Chris a real character.

Again, the real problem with the film is Sean Penn as screenwriter and director. I honestly do not know how he got the McCandless family’s approval to make this movie since it does make the family out to be rather two-dimensional and their son’s abandonment to be almost noble. The film does work in several places, but not enough to be recommendable, entirely because Penn wants us to recognize that he’s behind the camera. It’s apparent that he honestly wanted to play McCandless himself in how he directs Hirsch. He has his actor walking, talking, pausing, and internalizing like he himself would play this part. This is something not new in film (Robert Redford has done that with many of his young actors that I deem this technique a Redfordism), but it can be annoying. What he needed to do was let the story tell itself, to play the film as a natural element, almost documentary in feel. That’s what keeps the film from the greatness it could have been. And then there’s the Eddie Vedder songs, while not entirely bad, doesn’t really add anything to the film. Every time one came on, I thought to myself “here’s another Eddie Vedder song” and rolled my eyes.

There is something interesting in how many of the critics embraced this film with its unnatural technical experimentalism when they sneered at Julie Taymor’s radical filmmaking with Across The Universe. I would love to hear how they can back a film that takes precious to a whole new level and yet snide at a film that while as ambitious, doesn’t try to hide it under the veneer of earnestness.

Under discussion:

Ten Canoes  (2007)

Late into the film, a character tells another one that a good story is in the telling. Of course, this film is telling two stories to us from a storyteller who probably can’t keep either one straight on their own. The movie is called Ten Canoes; it’s from the wilds of Australia, told by and about a tribe of aboriginals (the native Australians before the British came into the picture. The story is told deep into its rich history before colonialism reached its shores.

As I mentioned, we’re actually getting two stories; the first being about a young man yearning for his older brother’s young wife. The second and primary story is a morality tale told to the young man by an older man. During this telling, our storyteller is telling us the play-by-play of both stories (which are separated with one story told in color while the other is in black and white. He stops in mid-thought several times to switch stories without warning, and eventually finds some of his own jokes to be funnier than we do. But as for his story, we follow yet another young man falling for his older brother’s youngest of three wives. He gets her alone only to have her shove him away. The village has quite a few quirks to it, including an old man with an addiction to honey, a couple of jealous wives (who are jealous of each other) among other colorful characters. But their world comes to grinding halt with a foreign medicine man comes looking for a trade in magics and instead starts putting spells on some really disgusting stuff. And then there’s the disappearance of a wife, which leads a more major conflict. The story itself, as it turns out, is really about the ending, but a means of occupying time. The message at the end is the one that was basically told in the beginning with the luxury of an added irony. And even at the end, the storyteller can’t say that the message was learned of it was even meant to be learning in the first place.

I love new way to tell stories, different perspectives that shed light on deeper character insight. But this storyteller in Ten Canoes is the equivalent of being told the story of The Three Little Pigs by a drunken relative that needs to stop every five seconds for another drink. That is disappointing since the film does have some great humor in it and is giving us an insight on a world we know little about. The last time Aboriginals are given screen time was Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence. In this one, we are given an insight to their cultural difference and traditions. Some are nearly barbaric, others quite endearing. Shot with the help of the people of Ramingning Tribe, the film feels authentic in it’s look on the lifestyle, but the way it tells the story feels really cheap and lessens the real drama and comedy of the story.  The outer-storyline is worthless and doesn’t really mesh with the more thorough main story. On top of that, the black and white really mess with the white subtitles that makes it very difficult to understand what’s being said.

Director Rolf De Heer has made quite a few movies before Ten Canoes, so he must have known better how to tell a story. The film sometimes feels made by an amateur at times, such as when we’re given multiple versions of the wife’s possible kidnapping. And then there’s one moment when an actor puts his hands on the camera that breaks the fourth wall, but not in a good way.

All in all, do not get me wrong about this movie; it’s not entirely bad. In fact, there are places that are interesting, but the film doesn’t keep it’s attention in the right place most of the time. The movie might lure you in with the promises of a good time, and a good time you might have. As long as you don’t mind stopping every five minutes for quick drink.