Juno
a movie
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: -3 (due entirely to personal squick factor)
Apparent Rating: 2/10

Normally a movie about a pregnant woman would go on a list of things never to watch, like sports news or fly fishing tournaments. However, Juno was an award winning movie that was supposed to be extraordinarily well written. I am all about the writing.

First. Let me say that the overall experience of the movie was really good. The writing was good, the directing was good, the production values matched, the settings were good, the acting was appropriate. The story’s premise is still inherently wrong and immoral and disgusting. There isn’t a way to get past that. The movie scoring a 2/10 in my personal ratings, shows it must have been phenomenally well done.

Scooting aside what I thought, Juno has some really big flaws. Like where does she get all that money? Seriously? 3 pregnancy tests and a gallon of Sunny D? That’s like $30 right there. She drives an hour out to the boonies and back in a station wagon. That’s like 8 gallons of gas. Sure the movie is from last year when gas wasn’t more than $4 per gallon, but still. Juno buys Bleeker a case of TicTacs. I don’t know what the case discount is, but a box of TicTacs is more than a dollar. Juno is always drinking on something non-water. Slushies or whatever. Those are $3-5 each in that multi-quart size. And she’s always eating. Junk food, but always eating— not eating at home, but at the mall or quickie marts or whatever. I didn’t have a couple hundred bucks a week when I wasn’t working and was just barely 16.

Some spoilers.

Another really huge problem I had with this movie is the slam on the adoptive dad when he bails. I don’t see why we should think of him as the villain. It’s easy for a nebulous decision about the future to bite you on the behind when it comes true but you never thought it would. “Everyone knows” that it’s almost impossible to adopt a healthy white baby. So I could see a man saying, “Sure, Honey. Put an ad in.” while thinking nothing would ever come of it. I was really appalled by how little space that man’s life, hopes, and dreams were allowed to have in that big house. If they’d had a smaller house, he wouldn’t have had to forego so many things— but then the adoptive mother’s baby!baby!baby! dreams would have been crushed. There really isn’t a compromise when something is an either-or decision. But the way the movie presented it, the adoptive dad was an evil bastard who is ruining the dreams of his wife. There was a lot of indications throughout that the wife was a controlling bitch who couldn’t allow anyone else to be happy, but then suddenly that constant pressure she’d been applying was all right. I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as a case where the adoptive father should have spoken up a long time before it got to that point, but putting up with things until the breaking point is part of that stoic expectation society still has for men.

I was really appalled that Juno hurt Bleeker’s feelings. I was really appalled that people have unprotected sex in this century. I was really appalled that Juno’s parents weren’t more upset with her and there didn’t seem to be any sort of punishment for really lousy judgment. (See reference above about endless spending money and gas money.) I was even more upset that Bleeker didn’t want his parents told and they were not. And I really really really disliked the ending where they sat on the stoop and sang some stupid song.

It was well written as a movie, but the story had the moral equivalent of someone who stomps kitten skulls for pleasure, so I cannot recommend it. Sick sick sick sick sick sick sick. It’s really too bad people with that kind of talent couldn’t have focussed it upon a story that deserves telling.