2 Years too late: Juno is a Terrible Terrible Film

Fuck me I hated Juno. What is it about it that I hated so much? I mean, I hated it perhaps more than any film I have ever seen. I have ideas, I can take a stab at guessing, but there is just something intangible, something elemental that I don't like, and it has lived in my brain since I first saw it.  When I was in my arrogant early twenties and Zombie came out, I swore that I could never see eye to eye with someone that liked The Cranberries. Now I’m in my arrogant early thirties I feel exactly the same way about Juno.

I first watched Juno in the States.  It hit me like a punch to the gut.  It was the most irritating film I’d ever seen.  I tore through the reviews looking for reviewers who thought the same as me, that hated it as much as I did but, to my horror, Juno got universally stunning press.  It currently has a freshness rating of 93% on Rotten Tomatoes.  I waited eagerly for the film to be released in the UK.  Surely the UK press wouldn't give this blindingly fake piece of crap the time of day?  Surely they would tear it to pieces?  But again I was confounded to see that it got brilliant notices.  So it was just me, right?  I truly felt isolated, as if this was Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  I just couldn't understand why people didn't see what I saw in this movie. But when I Googled "I Hate Juno" for the first time I discovered a significant undercurrent of dissent. Dissent like this Facebook group started by two shining lights of common sense in the Juno loving void that is popular opinion called Jesse Farrenkopf and Erin Cesaro. Confused people all over the world were arguing on forums and blogs with similar ideas to me.  I found some reviewers that had major issues with the film; very few, but they did exist.  So what was it about Juno that I found so hard to swallow? Why is it so divisive?

Some have said that Juno is shit because the dialogue is "fake" and "contrived" but I don't think that this is it. Films aren't real life, I know that, and Juno doesn't pretend to be a documentary. Juno is so arch, so knowing, so self confident in its own hip-ness and now-ness, it is a film designed to make its audience feel trendy, a back slapping roller coaster ride for the self regarding who mistake sarcasm for irony and utterly random pop culture references for a true decent, and meaningful, understanding of pop culture. People that would label themselves as trendy. They "get" Juno. It seems, on the surface, to be a perfect example of a film that they should like, so why would they not like it? It hooks the superficial in with its approximation of cool, but there is nothing, nothing at all, below the surface.

Trendy is an impossible thing to pin down.  You think you have caught it but when you lift up the glass, you have killed it. When you strive to capture the essence of cool, you instantly destroy it. The system can cynically create trends, no problem at all.  It can roughly document the trends of the past, obscuring the detail, but when it comes to reacting to trends or representing the presently trendy, it hasn't got a fucking clue. You start off thinking 'Brilliant, I’ve got a trendy script with hip dialogue going on here. Teenagers are going to be queuing up to see this' and, most of the time, what you've actually got is Gleaming the Cube.

The worst scene? The bit where they are discussing which bands are cool. Picking any band would have been bad. What the writer is doing here is making it known that THESE ARE THE BANDS THAT SHE LISTENS TO and THIS IS THE TYPE OF FILM THAT SHE LIKES and THIS IS WHAT IS COOL with a loud hailer. The scene seems to only exist because the writer wanted to make these statements. And who wouldn't have heard of Mott the Hoople? It like listening to your dad trying to talk about 'the hip hop' and so incredibly forced. When have you ever seen a band referenced like this in a film before that hasn’t been either ironic, or you are supposed to make value judgements about the people picking the bands? Take the films of John Hughes for instance. In all of those movies the bands are there, they are part of the fabric of the teenager’s lives, maybe on a t-shirt or on a poster, but he never mentions the current pop culture of the day. It’s suicidal. Imagine Ferris Bueller saying to Cameron ‘I’m on my Hamburger telephone, wanna come over and pick me up? We can listen to some Zigue Zigue Sputnik?’ he just wouldn’t do it!

The choice of bands for the soundtrack is as contrived as the dialogue.  Look at the sparkling list of pop naives’ littering the soundtrack. Kimya Dawson? Child voiced whine-cock. Barry Louis Polisar? Faux folk nursery twat.   The sugary tweeness of the list, and their close proximity to one another, means that the soundtrack runs the risk of becoming some sort of twee black hole, sucking in, and destroying forever, the reputations of any mildly decent band that comes within sucking distance. At one point I thought "what this film is missing is a twinkly Belle and Sebastian song" and low and behold, up one pops. Shame on you Stuart Murdoch. And Juno would never like Sonic Youth. Cody hangs out with people that think Sonic Youth are Cool, there is no concession made for the fact that Juno is half Cody’s age. It feels exactly like a script about teenagers written by an irritating thirty-something hipster. And, like someone loudly mentioning how many drugs they did the weekend before, or name dropping the shitty band that they got on the guest list to see, making statements about this sort of thing is a dangerous game to play.  It is very easy to look like a self regarding prick.

Even great artists are capable of dropping the ball like this, sometimes.  Graham Linehan, a man I love for his comedy writing, is obsessed with Guided by Voices.  He inadvertently destroyed a tiny part of that which he loves so much when he put this glaring name drop in an episode of the IT crowd.

I'll make up my own mind what's cool thank you, and as good and funny as the IT Crowd is, very funny indeed, it's a sitcom, not Melody Maker. The earnestness sticks out like a sore thumb.

You could understand it if Juno was flagged as arrogant or ignorant or naive but she never is. If, when she picked up her hamburger phone and said “I’m talking on my hamburger phone” the person on the other end said:

'You’re such and arrogant loser, let me come over and see your hamburger phone, then ask you about it, then you can go "yeah I got that the other week I like it" and then move on and I will go "wow, that is an interesting pop cultural artefact she has, and she is totally not waving it in my face. I want to be as cool as her."'

But she doesn’t, she essentially shouts “EVERYONE LOOK. I’VE GOT A HAMBURGER PHONE” When she listens to music she says “EVERYONE! I’LL JUST GO AND PUT ON MY VINYL SONIC YOUTH ALBUMS, BECAUSE I ACTUALLY PREFER THEM TO CDs”.

I don't want to make judgements about Diablo Cody, she may well be a lovely person who is deeply misunderstood, but she changed her name to Diablo Cody. If I knew someone that did that, I wouldn't be their friend anymore. I would tell them they were a fucking idiot. It wouldn't take anything else. That would be enough. Honestly. Change your name to Alison James? Fine. Jackie Edwards? Fine. But Diablo Cody?

Diablo: "My name was Helen Peterson, but I changed my name to Diablo Cody"
Mum: "Why did you do that? It's a terrible name"
Diablo: "I think it makes me sound really different. It makes me stand out. I wanted a name that fitted with my internal idea of myself as a crazy, wide eyed rebel."
Mum: "Please don't do it, it will make you sound like a stripper. Or an alternative porn actress who specialises in fisting"
Diablo: “I’m also going to get loads of tattoos, what do you think about that?"
Mum: "Oh dear, then you will sound and look like a stripper or an alternative porn actress who specialises in fisting"
Diablo: "Yeah, well, about that... I’m also going to become a stripper."
Mum: "Whatever you think is best dear, we will do our best to support you"
Diablo: (interrupting) "...Fuck off you square. I'll do what I like!  ...Oh, you don't mind and aren't really shocked at all. Thanks’, Mum. Can you lend me a fiver?"

There are a lot of people that say the hate directed at Cody is because she is a woman. And I’m sure that there are a fair amount of misogynists that hate the attention she is getting purely because they don't want to see a woman succeed. But how many other writers do you know that get the levels of attention she has been getting? I know the names of two writers, Paul Schrader and that guy who wrote Sliver and Basic Instinct. That's it. Now that Diablo Cody exists I know the name of three writers. She is hamstrung from the start. The moment she was pushed by the studio to be a 'name writer' and given endless interview time, people start to get pissed off. She would have had to have been a preternaturally charming and witty person to get over the initial "Why the hell are they so obsessed with the writer" resentment.   She is being pushed in the promotional adverts for Jennifer's Body as "The Genius Behind Juno". Add to this the obvious promotion of her "alternative" and "bad girl" persona, which would rile a few thousand extra potential viewers, and her obviously stratospheric self regard, and you begin to see that Juno being so divisive was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe it's just that the film makers tried to make something different and exciting and I just didn't get it. I like a lot of 'American independent' films. I loved Napoleon Dynamite; it made me swoon with jealousy with its spare script and brilliant execution. I liked Little Miss Sunshine. I thought it was low key and just the right side of sentimental. But Juno just stuck in my craw. I'm willing to accept that I am out of touch, but the reaction to Cody's follow up (movie), Jennifer's Body and the shear amount of people that just simply hated Juno, often for very similar reasons to myself, makes me think that I’m at least a little bit vindicated.

 

Brighton Argus Blogger, Juliette Wills

Good Lord! I think this is the most spiteful blog post i've ever read, Full English Breakfast at Tiffany's by Juliette Wills. RJ over at Amiable Dunce thinks she may just be testing the water and trying out a Garry Bushell/John Gaunt style persona for effect, I'm not so sure.

I wrote something else about this here.

The (continued) Rise of the Idiots – Super Super Magazine - Channel 4 - Monday 7th Sept

I really don't know where to start with the above clip. I assumed, at first, that it was a group of art students doing a really, really out of date Nathan Barley pastiche but some cursory searching seems to reveal that, unbelievably, Super Super Magazine is very real, and so are the wacky, entirely un-ironic funsters in this edition of the Channel 4 documentary, Three Minute Wonder. Watch it.

I could write a whole treatise on why Kassette player's oversize glasses are a fucking joke. I don’t hate these people, I just think that they are all absolute fucking idiots. I’m not saying that they should conform, for all I care they can dance through Shoreditch on to Dalston and out into Walthamstow dressed from head to toe in whatever flamboyantly unexpected attire they deem suitable.

I've changed my mind. I do hate them.

And why do I hate them? Because they are self satisfied, arrogant idiots. Idiots that are convinced that what they are doing definitely has meaning and worth and obviously gain such enormous satisfaction from their perceived 'differentness' that they never, not for one minute, question whether the stuff falling out of their brains has any real worth at all.

“Young people are fashionable yeah? So…Erm? Let me think. Why don’t we do a photo article on why old people are fashionable? Why should it only be young people that are considered fashionable? It will totally confound people’s expectations!”

“London's full of tramps, yeah? Why don’t we dress some tramps in some great clothes and take photos of them? It will totally confound people’s expectations and make, like, a really profound statement about poverty.”

“Most fashion photography contains images where the clothes are the focus, yeah? So people can see and compare the clothes they would like to purchase? Well, that's really obvious. Why don’t we totally confound people’s expectations and do a shoot where we blur all of the clothes, yeah? ”



Professing to not like irony, and claiming sincerity, whilst attempting to be as ironic as possible is something that idiot hipsters have been doing for generations. Check out the clip from Fist of Fun based, I think, on the short lived 80’s anger magnet The Modern Review, then watch Dan Ashcroft lamenting the rise of the idiots in Nathan Barley, a spot on show that, brilliant though it was, was already 3 years or more out of date when it aired; a lot like Super Super magazine, which seems to be shouting about the fact that it created the horrendous shit clash that was Nu Rave 2 years after the trend has become as fashionable as rickets. Idiots move on fast.



Some of my favourite bits from the film:

1. The way that Kassete recorder manages to both name check that she was contacted by a fashion magazine, subtly indicating she is very fashionable, and also, through word trickery, pretend that she hadn’t a clue why they phoned her up. I don’t know why anyone would think she was following a fashion. That is just how she dresses. She’s not that shallow! That bit made my teeth hurt. Also the t shirt she is holding is an ironically shit tribal design 'like a chav might have', on the cheeks of someones arse! So unexpected!
2. “What did you like about us”, the nice Brummie pensioner asks. “the colours”, she manages to babble. Why did they shoot this bit in Birmingham? To confound your expectations!
3. I love the 'new trend' of people wearing clothes from charity shops. 'It’s completely anti-fashion, but then comes all the way round and becomes fashionable again. Ironic really. I wouldn’t expect you to understand’. And I was really impressed when she said that she wouldn’t want to wear an Armani shirt and would prefer the Armi brand copy! She’s got so much integrity. I would totally have expected her to say that the Armani shirt would be a better thing to wear, as the Armi one is a hilarious low rent copy only twats would buy! She confounded my expectations by saying the opposite to that which was expected.
   

I hate them for another reason as well. A reason that Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris touch on in Nathan Barley. Because they ARE the industry. They exist in all levels of the media. They are television producers making the same fashionable crap over and over again for the 'youth market' and the magazine editors writing the same old stories, as if the stories have never been written before. They're the photographers and stylists convincing the world, as they are convinced themselves, that what they are producing is exciting and new, when it in fact it's derivative and dull. They are the commissioning editors telling script writers that the latest hit comedy show is the future, and more of the same will be even funnier and they are script writers writing appallingly lazy sketch shows and thinking them innovative, when in fact they are valueless, superficial wank. They are all those rewarded for producing boring non-ideas by artless superiors in an industry constantly in thrall to the rehashed vomit of the latest generation of talent. Talent that, with rare exception, exists on un-noticed cliche, monstrous egos and fleeting and mundane trends.

Being funny is good. That’s clever. Using irony correctly, for interesting reasons, that’s good. Making interesting statements about important things, that’s good. Making challenging art that makes people think, that’s good. All of these things are really hard things to do well, and very very easy to do badly. They are done badly every second of every minute of every day.

Most people that strive to produce something interesting and worthwhile beat themselves up over their lack of ideas, the fact that what they may think or write, or film, or make, has been thought written filmed and made a million times before. A new angle on a joke. A different way to tell a familiar story. Calling yourself Kassette Playa? Wearing hilarious over sized glasses? Designing ugly t shirts with arses on? Saying that you hate irony whilst existing entirely in a twatty London fishbowl, constructed almost entirely out of irony? These are not worthy things. Of course being fun and flippant rather than worthy is not a crime. But to do them with such a lack of self knowledge, such a massively misplaced sense of self confidence is incredibly offensive to people that know clever from stupid, which I hope is most people in the country.

Who knows if Channel 4 meant it to be a joke at these naïve young things expense? They certainly gave them enough rope to hang themselves with.

PS. All of the above, and so much more, is also why the film Juno was shit. But that is another blog post.