MY MOVIE SHELF: Juno

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 218  Days to go: 219

Movie #159:  Juno

I dressed up as Juno for Halloween three years ago, when I was pregnant with my youngest. Nobody knew who I was, but one guy at work guessed “someone from a movie about teenage pregnancy,” so I counted that in the win column, but I was pretty disappointed in the rest of humanity, if I’m being honest. Juno was a pop cultural touchstone in the late aughts, and I feel like more people should be aware of that.

Diablo Cody’s manufactured jargon script got a lot of backlash (not enough for her not to win the Oscar, but enough), but I think if you get past that mildly annoying affectation, it contains a really sweet and touching story. Juno (Ellen Page, breaking into the big time) is a junior in high school who indulged in some beautiful chair sex with her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and wound up pregnant. The movie takes us through the seasons as Juno’s pregnancy progresses and as she interacts and builds a relationship with the decidedly more upper class couple she’s chosen to be the adoptive parents, Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner).

Page handles the quirky dialogue well without making it sound too rehearsed, and Cera being an adorable doofus is kind of his bread and butter, only this time he adds tangy organge tic-tacs to the mix. They make an awkward and clumsy couple, never sure how to act around each other now that their friendship has been strained by pregnancy and never able to be as vulnerable and loving with each other as they want to deep down.

Meanwhile, Bateman and Garner are excellent as an affluent couple who clearly want different things but haven’t discussed it. Vanessa is an open wound of desperation and heartbreak, so painfully in need of a child and terrified of never getting that chance. She grasps onto the hope that Juno brings, but also fears it, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Mark, on the other hand, is the other shoe. He’s a big kid afraid of growing up, afraid of being responsible, silently blaming Vanessa for railroading him into something he isn’t ready for.

There’s a lot of pain, a lot of sorrow, and a lot of hope and optimism in the film. J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney are snarky and supportive as Juno’s parents, not really putting up with any of her angst but loving her completely, making it perfectly clear they have her back no matter what. It has a great message about love and family, about finding someone who loves you for exactly who you are. It’s uplifting in that way, to the point where I honestly don’t even notice the forced quirkiness. I just notice the joy.

Because in the end, joy is what Juno is selling. Everyone should know that.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Catch Me If You Can

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #46: Catch Me If You Can

I’ve had a sort of fascination with Leonardo DiCaprio since he first showed up on my TV in Growing Pains. I wouldn’t call it a crush necessarily, although I do, at times, find him devastatingly handsome and charming. It’s more accurate to say he intrigues me. Even as a short, goofy teen with a weird name, he had this sort of presence and intensity I found striking. He made me want to pay attention to him, and I’ve done so the entirety of his career. So it’s no surprise I own a few of his movies (not a lot — it’s not a crush; I really do go in for the merit of a piece and a role), but the reason I really love Catch Me If You Can is the score.

John Williams is known for bold, soaring, sweeping film scores. Having worked with Steven Spielberg on nearly all of the director’s films, he’s responsible for some of the most recognizable and popular scores of the last forty years: E.T., Jaws, Schindler’s List, and Indiana Jones, not to mention the music he wrote for Star Wars or the first two Harry Potter films. The man is a genius and a legend, but the score for Catch Me If You Can is a revelation in its singularity. It doesn’t sweep. It doesn’t soar. It’s not bold. It’s an impish, jazzy little tune that trips and skips around the action. It builds and deepens to emphasize the caper elements of the film, adding oboes and standing bass to fill out the sound, but it never becomes big or overbearing or all-encompassing. It teases, it taunts. Like the playful chase between Frank (DiCaprio) and Carl (Tom Hanks), Williams’s score is an auditory game of cat and mouse, always ducking and moving, never getting caught. It completely embodies the tone and nature of the film, as well as the upper-middle class ’60s time period. I could listen to it for hours.

The film, of course, is “inspired by true events,” which is the best way to frame a movie about the past, in my opinion. Take actual events and/or people and embellish or edit them, as is necessary for any film, and never get the backlash of people who think you strayed too far from the “truth,” as if the histories we’re told are ever completely true instead of filtered through our own lenses and the lenses of those doing the telling. The truth is, there was a young man named Frank Abagnale Jr. who, between the ages of 16 and 19, forged millions of dollars worth of checks and traveled all over the world posing as an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer. That all happened. Whether Frank actually perpetrated all the cons attributed to him in the movie in the exact ways they’re presented is inconsequential to me. I’m here to be entertained. In fact, the more entertained I am, the more likely I am to seek out additional information about the actual history of a person or event. The only time I compare a movie about actual events to the actual events in question, I am doing it admiringly, and I wholeheartedly admire this movie.

The cons presented are absolutely entertaining, as you would expect them to be, but the real treat for me comes in all the actresses doing cameos or small roles as Frank’s many conquests. He’s a teenager, remember, so he has little to no experience with women. He’s asked his mother to apologize to a tenth grader from his school for his failing to take her to prom, for God’s sake, and yet he’s charming and seducing countless gorgeous women as part of his many identities. His “best date” girl, a stewardess named Marci, is played by the sexy and knowing Ellen Pompeo. The bank teller who explains how the MICR codes work is Elizabeth Banks, first awkward and flattered, then boldly flirtatious. The nurse he asks to marry him is the girlish Brenda, played by a young Amy Adams. And the model-turned-prostitute, who unknowingly winds up paying Frank $400 for their night together, is played by Jennifer Garner. The movie doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, but these little glimpses of great, fun actresses getting to play around a bit in these lively little roles showing varying degrees of worldliness and sex appeal is delightful to me.

If anything doesn’t work for me in the film, it’s the fuzzy, idealized relationship Frank has with his parents and the way they tend to justify everything he does in the same blind way he looks at them. Somehow they’ve all convinced themselves nothing is really wrong here, and that Frank’s actions are justified. Even the movie itself paints Frank as a scared kid, so traumatized by his parents’ divorce that he disappears into these new identities as a way of escaping his reality. It’s as if the film wants the audience to forgive Frank for his transgressions, instead of letting them judge him for the sophisticated criminal he actually was. Perhaps it would be harder to tell the story that way, this slick and mischievous tale of a charming huckster, if they didn’t also try to make him sympathetic. And he’s certainly redeemed himself in the time since, becoming a renowned consultant helping companies protect themselves from fraud, so maybe he’s earned some sympathy. But it still feels like a bit of a cop-out.

Also, Tom Hanks with a harsh New England accent is both comical and grating, but I guess he can’t be good at everything.