JUST SAY JUNO
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Let me say right off the top, I went to see Juno of my own volition. Had I paid more attention to the reviews, checked out the chatter in the blogosphere, realized Roger Ebert had picked it as his #1 movie of the year (don’t ask me why that’s a factor, it just is --frankly, the guy hasn’t been right since Gene Siskel died), maybe I would’ve re-thought the decision. But I was bamboozled by a tight trailer with a vaguely indie soundtrack. All critical faculties were ignored. I have no one else to blame.
To be fair, Juno isn’t a terrible movie. I have sat through much worse. Much, much worse. My disappointment with it can be best summed up in three words: Little Miss Sunshine.
I can already hear the howls of outrage. “But I loved Little Miss Sunshine!!” (From here on, known as LMS.) “Everybody loved LMS! It was the feel good, breakout hit of `06! LMS was a Best Picture Oscar nominee! Juno is this year’s LMS. So what are you talking about, you Juno/LMS hating asshole?!”
OK, OK. Let’s keep it civil, screeching voices in my head. Everybody loved the National Socialists in parts of Europe for a while too but that didn’t make their product good in any sense of the word. In fact, I’ve heard told that their trains didn’t run any better than they did in non-fascist countries. The hype was all marketing.
Precariously traversing this tautly stretched analogy, I will suggest that the success of movies like Juno and LMS are similarly dependent on marketing rather than actual content.
There’s nothing overly shocking by that statement. Hollywood, it can be argued, is Hollywood almost exclusively due to marketing. The Dream Factory. Dubious product can be easily foisted on the public if marketed properly. Exhibit A? Almost the entire 1980s Hollywood film library. (Except for you, Caddyshack; you will always have a special place in my heart.) If you’re older than 14, you realize that and adjust your expectations accordingly.
Every now and then though, it’s easy to get blindsided, no matter how savvy you think you are. A movie will catch your attention, you’ll let your guard down and only after it’s too late, after you’ve paid your money and found the perfect seat in the theatre, it’ll dawn on you that you’ve been had, tricked, drawn into to the darkness under false pretences. In an ideal world, you’d storm out and demand a refund but in reality, you just sit back to admire the marketing skills that reeled you in. Sometimes that realization happens immediately. Sometimes it won’t dawn on you until the lights come up.
With Juno, I realized my mistake right from the opening credits. Like the lo-fi song that was playing, the animated sequence on screen was supposed to denote an indie sensibility. The graphics were stark, black and white sketches with no glossy finish, almost DYI-like. Almost. On closer inspection, I’m pretty sure it took a lot of money to get the animation to simulate that low-budget feeling.
Still in the opening credits, the screenwriter’s name flashed by: Diablo Cody. Who, aside from a movie character, has a name like Diablo Cody? I want to be called Diablo Cody! What were my parents thinking? Daren Foster. Clearly, they never wanted me to be a successful Hollywood screenwriter.
Then, the eponymous lead character opened her mouth and any suspension of disbelief was thereby unsuspended. Juno spoke with a self-aware, self-deprecating, yet empowering tone every teenage girl must dream of using. Hell, I wish I were that well-spoken. Or that funny. Or that full of witty cultural references. Or that strong in the face of overwhelming choices. Damn it! I wish I were Juno MacGuff. (Yeah. That’s right. That was the character’s name, as improbably appealing as Diablo Cody.)
Truth be told, by about 3 minutes into the movie, I wasn’t really all that engaged anymore. I sat back in my seat and took in the surroundings at which point I realized the place was full of teenaged girls. I hadn’t seen this kind of gathering of adolescent females under one roof since the last high school dance I attended back in.. well, that’s another story. So this was the movie’s target audience. I had been hoodwinked into thinking that it was me the filmmakers had intended to reach with their film. Apparently not. Filmmakers haven’t targeted me since the early-80s which starts to explain much of my ambivalence with movies over the past couple of decades.
Realizing this, I was forced to accept that I was now officially a middle-aged man.
This relegation to the proverbial cheap seats would be much easier to deal with if the audience Juno intended to target actually enjoyed it. At the show I sat through, the movie seemed like a minor component of the audience’s attention. Girls came and went at frighteningly regular intervals. At the movie’s two designated emotional high points, rows of young women snickered. (So did I but I’m assuming we had different reasons.) One girl sitting in front of me peered at her brightly lit cell phone screen for the duration of the movie.
I wonder how it feels to work in a studio marketing department, marketing products for a demographic that doesn’t give a shit about your product. Just get the bums into the seats, I guess. You can also hope for some collateral audience, your Roger Eberts, your portion of the movie-going audience who want to walk away feeling good, no matter how inorganic or manufactured that ‘feel-good’ People who actually believe that there is a screenwriter out there named Diablo Cody.
Me? I left the theatre, found myself a pub and downed a couple pints of Strongbow to cleanse my palette of artificial sweetener. Then, I rushed out to the next showing of The Savages to wallow in the toxic mire of middle-aged anxiety and disappointment that constitutes my own, special demographic.
