Ankle-frack Round-Up 1 - YOUNG ADULT

Forced into house arrest after a particularly nasty ankle injury, I have decided to finally get around to reviewing all those releases that I didn't get round to originally.  First up, YOUNG ADULT.....

YOUNG ADULT is a brilliantly scabrous tragicomedy from the writer and director behind JUNO. It's  about a narcissistic delusional writer of Young Adult fiction who returns to her home town to break up the marriage of her high school sweetheart. It's a testament to the nuance and bravery of Diablo Cody's script and Charlize Theron's lead performance that she allows Mavis to be quite unlikeable but that we still care about her emotional journey. Mavis can be deliberately mean-spirited - she is horribly rude to the disabled town geek (Patton Oswalt) and shamelessly uses him as a drinking buddy while she waits to pounce on her beloved Buddy (Patrick Wilson).  But she's at her most compelling when she's just plain disconnected - like when she asks the provincial sales assistant if the store stocks Marc Jacobs.  She's a girl who's ridden along on her good looks - she's trumpeted as the town's success - all the more tragic then that the books she writes aren't selling, and she's desperate for a family.  

YOUNG ADULT is gritty in a way that few movies dare to be.  DP Eric Steelberg (UP IN THE AIR) zooms in on Mavis itching her balding scalp and spitting into an ink cartridge to make it work.  It's a signal that this is a movie about the way our bodies betray us as - about the dangers of making a myth out of high school love. Then again, Cody's script doesn't dwell on that physical frailty long enough to beg our sympathy. There's a cool matter-of-factness to both Mavis and the movie.  The grittiness extends to the narrative arc.  Sure, there's a scene of "emotional catharsis" near the end, where key facts are revealed, but there's no easy redemption or new-found likeability.  And the relationship between Theron and the schlubby Matt goes no further than it would likely go, rather than giving us a nice rom-com pay-off.  In fact, now I think of it, there's little humour in the movie at all, and certainly very little that's do with the narrative arc. Rather, there are some very funny sly scenes where Cody winks at her critics who wonder how she writes like a "teen".

I loved YOUNG ADULT even though it didn't really make me laugh, never gave me any emotional release, and didn't really teach me anything I didn't know. There's just something refreshingly honest about a movie that dares to be disliked. It's like the pitch for Seinfeld - no-one hugs, no-one learns everything.  

YOUNG ADULT was released in winter 2011/2013 and is now available to rent and own. Charlize Theron was nominated for a Golden Globe.

London Film Fest Day 15 - JUNO rocks my world

JUNO is another of those films that you feel wouldn’t have happened before Wes Anderson and Sundance took off and Napoleon Dynamite became a sleeper hit. You know what I mean. The faux-naif acoustic soundtrack featuring Kinks songs and Lou Reed. The quirky characters that say ever-so-slightly unrealistic things about life and love. The over-designed sets, crammed with bad-taste props and trashy clothes. The use of carefully designed credits with a hand-made feel – this time half-animated. The insistent campy visual motifs – in this case Michael Cera’s track-suit and the joggers who run across screen every now and then. I mean, Sweet Tap-Dancing Little Miss Sunshine, it even features a beat-up camper van.

For all that, JUNO remains a very smart, very witty and thoroughly engaging film. That’s largely down to a whip-smart script by new-comer, Diablo Cody, the good comic timing of director Jason Reitman (THANK YOU FOR SMOKING) and flawless dead-pan performances from Ellen Page (HARD CANDY), J K Simmons and Allison Janney. In addition, Michael Cera gives a stealth performance that is so quiet it’s easy to overlook how good he is.

Page plays an intelligent but, yes, fundamentally dumb, 16 year old girl called Juno, who gets knocked up by her best friend Paulie Bleeker (Cera). At first, she thinks she’ll just get a quick abortion but almost on impulse decides to give the baby up for adoption. Her parents (Simmons and Janney) are flummoxed but supportive, and while Juno gets odd looks at school she has enough moxy to front it out. The putative adoptive parents are played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. Bateman is suitably slippery as the cool older guy. There’s a lot of sexual tension between him and the much younger Page – and I suppose it doesn’t hurt that viewers will partially read Page’s precocious, flirtatious character from HARD CANDY onto her portrayal of Juno. Garner is also fantastic as a slightly snobbish but fundamentally decent yuppie who’s desperate for a kid. She makes what could have been a rather cliché’d annoying character sympathetic. There’s also a hysterical opening cameo from Rainn Wilson as a clerk.

Performances and big belly-laughs aside, the great thing about JUNO is that it’s a proper story with characters that develop and change and events that take us by surprise but also seem plausible and credible. Moreover, instead of letting this become some day-time TV serial cliffhanger about whether the adoption will go ahead, Reitman/Cody rejig the focus to the love story between Cera and Juno. All this adds up to a movie that’s funnier than the already decent THANK YOU FOR SMOKING but which has more narrative drive and a more satisfying emotional pay-off. Instead of drifting in the third act, JUNO actually gets better. And while JUNO doesn’t quite pip SON OF RAMBOW at the post for best comedy at London 2007, it gives it a damn good run for its money.

JUNO played Toronto and London 2007 and goes on release in the US on December 5th. It opens in Australia and Sweden in January 2008, in Finland, Italy, Spain, the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands in February and in Germany in March.