Juno

This film starts and ends with a chair, more or less anyway. This says a lot about the tone of the film, it’s quite quirky and irreverent. It’s got a great indie soundtrack for a pretty solid indie movie.

The basic premise is that Juno (Ellen Page) has sex with a guy called Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and gets pregnant and then has to deal, with varying degrees of maturity, with the consequences.

It turns out that all you need to produce three positive pregnancy tests is well pregnancy obviously and a very large amount of Sunny D.

I still can’t find any explanation for why she has a Hamburger phone, apart from maybe that’s what you do if you’re about to become a food obsessed whale.

After finding out she is pregnant she forgoes an abortion down to some blueberry-flavoured condoms and the fact that babies have finger nails.

So this leaves her with the option of getting a good couple to adopt the baby. Needless to say she find a worthy couple and gets to really like the adoptive father to be.

Things don’t run as smoothly as planned of course, but with parents as supportive as Juno’s they don’t need to.

All in all this is very sweet and funny film. Maybe it gets a little too sweet in places, but it doesn’t make you gag – just mostly laugh and gesticulate at the screen. It’s a sad state of affairs that parents would rather have their child addicted to hard drugs or expelled from school than have a baby at 16.

There are some good one-liners and the performances are generally very convincing.

Also it’s nice to see a film that deals with a mother to be, even if she’s giving up her baby, so sensitively and affectionately.

Here is the final version.