Well, let's see some of the positions the movie takes:

1. Irony and snark won't pull you through; commitment and love will.

2. A real strong dad who finds satisfaction in his wife and children is better to have around than a hip, sexy guy who still dreams of the vie boheme and resents his bougie wife.

3. At 17, "You're the coolest person I know" is a compliment. At 37, "Aren't you the cool one" is a well deserved expression of contempt.

4. Whatever you do about it, pregnancy has consequences.

5. After all the cards have been shuffled, we still wind up with a deserted single mom who loves her baby.

Underneath the glib dialog, hip name checks and calm acceptance that teenagers actually have sex lives, Juno is a profoundly conservative celebration of traditional family values and an attack on bohemian self indulgence. I suspect that there are a lot of people who find themselves insulted by it.

jack_cerf:

Underneath the glib dialog, hip name checks and calm acceptance that teenagers actually have sex lives, Juno is a profoundly conservative celebration of traditional family values and an attack on bohemian self indulgence. I suspect that there are a lot of people who find themselves insulted by it.

I am not sure that came out quite the way you intended. A "calm acceptance that teenagers actually have sex lives" is inconsistent with a "profoundly conservative celebration of traditional family values".

Those traditional family values are grounded in the ability to ignore uncomfortable real-life facts like teenagers having sex lives. Feeling the insult there would require an ability to recognize such inconvenient facts.

You've got Jack on that, Tonto. I'd argue, though, that the attitude toward sex is one meant to comfort: teenagers have sex in the most simple way, and they only do it ONCE before learning their lesson.

And otherwise I'd say Jack is dead on--the movie validates a very conventional sense of what's right (YOU, the moviegoer). For those who like warm indoor pools, it's a comforting night of entertainment.

1. A quick, impulsive hump with a guy friend is not a sex life. You're right about the "I got pregnant the first time I did it" comment. Comforting but highly unrealistic.

2. A warm indoor pool beats the heck out of swimming in a flooded river.

The thing is, EVERYONE likes warm indoor pools. But calling a warm indoor pool "the little warm indoor pool that could" when everyone is already swimming in it and ignoring the majestic glacial lake outside is ridiculous... well that metaphor may break down after a while but you get the idea.

"Juno" inspires vitriol because it is being billed as the 'underdog' as if this were the first time a quirky hollywood movie modeled after the quirky post-"Rushmore" indies. But really, the same 'little movie that could' was nominated last year-- Little Miss Sunshine. And that movie was equally annoying in its attempt to blend the literate, nearly pretentious language of quirky indies with the populist, familial melodramedy of hollywood cheesefests.

But really, Juno isn't that bad. At all. It really does warm you over by the end. It just isn't that good. Like Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, the aforementioned Little Miss Sunshine, and many other quirky tales of young people doing silly things with Gilmore-Girls dialog and hip soundtracks, it's something we've seen before. To call it a "change," to say it's "new," rings false. That is what people are rejecting.

tonto_goldberg:

jack_cerf:

Underneath the glib dialog, hip name checks and calm acceptance that teenagers actually have sex lives, Juno is a profoundly conservative celebration of traditional family values and an attack on bohemian self indulgence. I suspect that there are a lot of people who find themselves insulted by it.

I am not sure that came out quite the way you intended. A "calm acceptance that teenagers actually have sex lives" is inconsistent with a "profoundly conservative celebration of traditional family values".

Don't confuse what James Dobson has to say with traditionalist family values.

What's essential to the traditionalist position isn't chastity. It is that sex cannot and should not be separated from its reproductive consequences, and that one's obligations to one's children are more important than self gratification.

Orwell wrote that the English working class of his day believed that individual life and ambition more or less ended with marriage and the (inevitable) birth of children. They showed age younger than the middle class because they try to preserve their youth with exercise and avoidance of child bearing. This, Orwell attributed to middle class selfishness.

Cody seems to think the same. Mac and Mark are sharply contrasted, and there's no doubt which one the movie favors. Juno is free to terminate the pregnancy and chooses not to out of a feeling of responsibility that she can't define.

Could not have said it better myself. Like Ivan Reitman's son is out maxing his credit cards to get this "unique" little movie made against all odds or something. Please. I'll put it this way, if you've heard of it, it probably isn't really very "indie." There is a giant marketing machine behind this movie. This is carefully calculated to hit all of the requisite "indie" quirk buttons. My theory is that the Academy seeks to nominate this kind of film so that it's members can still believe themselves hip and relevant.

1. $100 million at the box office ticks some people off. Like Sunshine (which I couldn't stand), if the mass public likes it that much, how good could it be? Real art, everyone knows, must be adversarial. Juno is a sheep in wolf's clothing, which is more annoying than a self-admitted sheep.

2. Let's not forget envy. Pretty much every year, one indie movie (and only one) hits the mass market lottery. There are a lot of other hard working, talented people out there just as anxious to have the opportunity to sell out, whether or not they admit it. I'm sure many of them think they (or people they know) have done better work and that Reitman/Cody/Page got a break they didn't deserve. Adding to the envy factor is that Reitman is second generation Hollywood who has already made one moderately successful commercial release before this.

The columnist was discussing "conservative family values" which has come to mean that obnoxious longing for a lifestyle that never existed back in some previous era that also never existed.

The way they sometimes put it to try and co-opt your spot-on definition of tradionalist family values is "values we want to be traditional" which both recognizes and denies the limitations of fact-based reality.

That probably has something to do with why some people resent and hate Micheal Moore so much. His appearance doesn't help either, but that's another day's story.

Who says a movie has to be "new" to be either good or Academy Award material? What's wrong with a movie about fairly normal people leading regular lives who have real conversations (which only sound pretentious compared to the monosyllabic musings of grittier films)? I, for one, am glad to have at least one Academy Award-nominated film that is neither violent, dark, nor outright depressing. A movie with characters one can relate to--what a concept!

Why is it that people, and especially movie critics, don't seem to understand or even like the more subtle conflicts. Is subtlety too realistic? Too vague? Does subtlety make it too difficult to choose the bad guys? It seems a lot easier for them to deal with one-dimensional characters and a plot that consists of killing the characters off; either one-by-one like in a mystery, or in bunches like war movies or westerns.

Part of what movie critics do -- how they see their job -- is to anticipate what their readers will like. Of course they draw the line. They know Norbit is going to be a huge hit, but they trash it anyway. But a movie like this, they have no choice but to embrace: they know people will like it, and they know that relative to everything else they're forced to see, they basically liked it. So, bam!, it gets uniformly positive reviews and we're off! Then: cue backlash! It all creates a weird disconnect -- how come all the CRITICS likes it, but my friends whose taste I trust were (at best) split on it? It gets extremely confusing. Still, I don't envy a critics job -- I wouldn't last two weeks, because I'd write bad reviews of everything, then suddenly praise "LAST DAYS," which most of my readership would walk out of.

Fabulous points! It is not a new film. I have seen it before and I've seen it done better. And much like the Tarantino wannabes in the 90's, I'm sick of Kevin Smith wannabes cramming too much pop-culture driven dialogue into the mouths of hipsters who are supposedly smarter than the average person. Just because they are teenagers quoting Soupy Sales doesn't make them better or smarter than everyone around them.

A teenager who knows there was a Soupy Sales is better and smarter than everyone around them. Their frame of reference is larger than their contemporaries.