Mini-Review :: Juno

For the most part, I try to keep my reviews fairly formal. I don't want merely to restate a film's plot or simply to devise clever ways of simply saying "I think this" or " it's rubbish." I review films as if they are works of art and literature that demand or require intellectual responses... at least, I hope I do. But this, I suppose, means that I limit the kinds of movies I want to review (of course, I reviewed both Live Free or Die Hard and Halloween on this site so obviously a movie doesn't need to be intelligent to warrant an intellectual response). It also means that unless a movie provokes me, either positively or negatively, I don't really have anything to say about it.

Which brings me to Juno. Juno is a fantastic film filled to the brim with those elusive qualities we like to call "heart" and "quirk," not not so full of either of them as to be too sentimental or too pretentious. It's tender and it's human. For better or for worse, however, that's all I can come up with to say about it. Ellen Page's performance is pitch-perfect and is a beautiful combination of strength and vulnerability and Jason Reitman's direction is remarkably solid, always ironically flirting with indie cliches and yet remaining self-aware enough to avoid them. That's it. I loved the film but have nothing of real substance to say about it, at least not yet. There are a million other reviews of this film out there, most of them raving, so I'll just leave it at this: go see it.