Enchanted

Once you get past the abhorrent first ten minutes, Enchanted settles into a fairly nice, live-action rhythm, and coasts on the considerable charms of much-praised Amy Adams and the here-underappreciated Patrick Dempsey. Yet what a chore those first ten minutes are: so low-grade, unimaginative, and badly drawn is the animated sequence that sets up this sub-Roger Rabbit mixed-media romantic comedy that I truly suspect Disney designed it as the death knell for two-dimensional animation. Almost as a way to prove the dominance of computer-generated imagery in animated features, this oppressively streamlined product offers a wretched opening sequence of talking animals, giant-lassoing heroes, and damsels in distress that purports to deconstruct fairy-tale cliches but actually simply mocks and bashes Disney tradition. (Not a bad thing per se, but from a company renowned for mistreating and shitting all over its own legacy it seems transparent and disingenuous.) Enchanted should have felt like a veritable, engaging animated film rudely interrupted by a live-action one; instead the beginning is simply a tired prologue, so hideously, rudely designed that it has the entire audience uncomfortably waiting for the “real movie” to begin. The visual glories, infinite textures, and storytelling audacity of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Bambi are traded in for flat, direct-to-video shapelessness—add a miserable Alan Menken ditty that wipes out all memories of the terrific show tunes that helped rebuild the Disney animation empire in the 1990s, and you basically have a subliminal ten-minute commercial for CGI.

So, what of the rest of the film? Overlong, relatively uninspired, and not altogether unenjoyable. If male critics can tear their eyes away from Amy Adams “becoming a star before their eyes,” maybe they’d notice that the film’s central conceit (that a workaday single dad, who, in a refreshing character twist, tries to impress upon his daughter the importance of strong, independent women, falls hard for a dippy fairy princess) rests equally on Patrick Dempsey’s casual charms. And though Enchanted’s final sequence neatly reverses entrenched fairy-tale gender roles, the rest of the film does little more than reiterate them—a pretty egregious throwaway gay joke, in which a grotesque leather daddy makes a come-hither smile to James Marsden’s Prince Charming, serves as proof of where the film’s straight-and-narrow politics lie.

I Am Legend

A refreshing rejoinder to the increasing comic-book aesthetic taking over fantasy and horror filmmaking, Francis Lawrence’s impressively serious adaptation of Richard Matheson’s beloved sci-fi novel I Am Legend is both a surprisingly sober end-of-the-world scenario and an expertly crafted movie-star vehicle. Lawrence is superb at heightening tension through perfectly calibrated visuals and also allowing nearly every shot to register as though truly experienced by leading man Will Smith, as a scientist voluntarily left behind in a dead New York City to work on a cure for the plague that has wiped out most of humanity and then turned the survivors into rabid, cannibal “dark seekers.” So thoroughly aligned are we to Smith’s perspective that at times I Am Legend feels like the blockbuster equivalent to Diving Bell and the Butterfly; though the images are memorably grandiose (Manhattan streets emptied of life, untended and overgrown with weeds, bombed out Brooklyn Bridge), the overall feeling is lonely and intimate. So persuasive is Lawrence’s evocation of doomsday and so fully inhabited is Smith’s alternately tender and gruff performance that the apperance of the zombies half-hour into the film came as a shock; with such dramatic heft who needs CGI flesh-eaters?

If I Am Legend has one serious drawback it’s those awkwardly designed monsters, who look like elasticized Lord of the Rings hold-overs. Why Lawrence decided to go the animation route rather than use effects make-up could only be money-related, and it’s a major compromise (the creatures are only frightening when initally glimpsed in a shadowy huddle early in the film). Yet it’s a testament to how well Lawrence handles the material that the CGI botch ultimately matters little. The impressions left by I Am Legend are of very serious, human matters, whether it’s Smith’s wrenching heartbreak upon losing his beloved dog or the way in which he interacts with mannequins he has populated throughout the city. Smith is a truly magnetic movie star; if anything, he may live up to the film’s title.

In John Sayles's vision of small-town Alabama circa 1950, a young wanderer has to stop and ask, "Hey man, what side of the tracks am I on?" He isn't behaving preposterously; amidst the distressed wood and self-conscious metal junk blanketing the sets of Honeydripper, the boy really can't tell. Sayles's films are generally celebrated for their leavened characterizations and authentic grit; Honeydripper, produced with a much larger bankroll than his previous work, lends credence to the notion that independents need to hover around the poverty line to produce anything substantial. As a screenwriter, Sayles is famously heavy-handed in his exposes of “social issues,” but he gets away with it by crafting good dialogue. Talking is what it's all about; Brother from Another Planet, Lone Star, Casa de Los Babys, and Silver City are, in a sense, essay films. Sayles obviously envisions his audiences embarking on heated rap sessions after filing out of the art house, but the stiff rusticisms here are unlikely to inspire anything but snorts: "If dat ain't true den grits ain't groceries!" It's bad history on a bloated budget. Click here to read Leah Churner's review of Honeydripper.

Also: earlier, Kristi Mitsuda's review of the film on indieWIRE.

The organic foreboding conjured by an opening prelude torn from the past -- depicting children at play outdoors on a beautiful summer day full of pollen and petals, their caretakers looking on from inside a looming manor -- calls to mind elusive, unclassifiable films like Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence rather than genre movies of the horror variety to which The Orphanage belongs. Too bad, then, that this beguiling subtlety is quickly upended as the opening credits roll -- kicking off with a big "Guillermo del Toro Presents" banner that signals the film's bald bid to become this year's Pan's Labyrinth (a dubious prospect if you happened to find that Foreign Language Oscar nominee overhyped, as I did) -- to the tune of a score distractingly reminiscent of Psycho and indicative of the more well-worn path Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona's feature debut will follow.

Click here to read Kristi Mitsuda's review of The Orphanage.

And click here to read Emily Condon's review from the NYFF.

Surprise, surprise: You'll be hearing a lot more, eh, gushing about Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood from your friendly neighborhood Reverse Shotters in the days and weeks to come.

First up, Michael Koresky's feature article on There Will Be Blood for Stop Smiling.

In the introduction to The Profits of Religion (1917), which he called a “study in Supernaturalism,” Upton Sinclair wrote: “Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence?” Sinclair’s common targets were distinctly American, the capitalist and the religious zealot, both seemingly locked in a self-serving quest for righteousness, and deceived by their own single-minded surety. With Sinclair’s status as a turn-of-the-century muckraker, tireless Socialist advocate, gubernatorial candidate, and even novelist all but forgotten by later generations (save 1906’s eternally cited The Jungle), a literal resuscitation of Sinclair’s point of view would be all but raising the dead. In There Will Be Blood, his new adaptation of Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson wisely invokes Sinclair less as literal source material than as a guiding spirit. Anderson chose to focus only on the book’s first 150 pages, specifically the relationship between an oil prospector and his son, as well as the character of the antagonistic preacher Eli Sunday. Eliminating, among other things, the book’s advocacy for the rights of oilfield workers, Anderson’s whittling down of the novel brings his film even closer to Sinclair’s view of man as “evasive beast,” plagued by “unheroic self-indulgence.” Click here to read the article in its entirety.

We try to review all we possibly can at Reverse Shot, between our full-length pieces at the site proper and our weekly reviews for indieWIRE, yet it’s sadly impossible to cover everything. So, despite our commitment to commenting on film culture generally, and trying to champion great films and deride those less worthy, a lot of films fall through the cracks. I always feel guilty when a film doesn’t have an “official Reverse Shot response”—unlikely there could ever be such a thing, since there are so many different writers with different sensibilities here, but I digress . . .

So here’s round one of films that, for whatever reason, didn’t receive coverage on Reverse Shot, Reverseblog, or indieWIRE in 2007, but that were noteworthy in some way. Sorry, guys, still no Enchanted.

Lust, Caution
I finally caught up with this about two months after it opened; tepid critical response didn’t exactly have me clamoring for tickets opening weekend, and it became one of those films that just seemed to linger in the theaters forever—long enough to make it a weekend possibility eight weeks running. Gladly, I decided to take in an early Saturday matinee at the Sunshine Cinema and settled in for an immensely pleasurable chunk of classical storytelling, as well as a terrific breakthrough performance. As Tang Wei’s Wong Chia Chi evolves from shy schoolgirl to hesitant revolutionary, and finally, most disturbingly, to sexual martyr, Ang Lee’s direction grows increasingly urgent, and his dark espionage story takes on tragically masochistic dimensions. Certainly, the film’s misogynist undertones, however self-conscious, make this a discomfiting watch, but the main criticisms it received from most viewers (that it was soporific, uninvolving, lugubrious) just don’t make sense to me: there’s a patient, rich quality to the filmmaking and performances (especially Tang Wei, who’s been entirely overlooked in this monotonous awards season), and Lee shows true respect to his audiences, letting his novelistic tale unfold with, yes, God forbid, leisure. And let it be said that the NC-17-earning sex scenes with Tang and the ever brave Tony Leung that engendered a bit of discussion in September, though conventionally montaged into naughty bits and pieces, are surprisingly sturdy, worthily explicit, and structurally brilliant—when they arrive about an hour and forty-five minutes into the film, they hit with thunderbolt force: real people, we’ve grown to know and either trust or distrust, adding one more layer of role-playing (this time sadomasochistically sexual) to their already indecipherable veneers.

Michael Clayton
Can subtlety be hit home with sledgehammer? In the last shot of Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy has a quietly triumphant George Clooney, who’s just brought down corporate dragon lady Tilda Swinton’s house of cards, ride off into the sunset, like any great hero. Yet this is hardly on horseback: instead, Clooney sits in the back of a cab as it loops endlessly down crowded Manhattan streets, the camera fixed in medium close-up on his face. He hardly smiles, yet there’s the faint detection of satisfaction on his lips; or is it a hesitation in his moist eyes? Or is that just the distinguished grey talking? As he stares in the general direction of the camera, evoking hints of granite-jawed emotion, the credits begin to appear—“unassumingly,” down in the bottom right corner of the screen. As the roster of names are checked off with deceptive simplicity, the tinkly James Newton Howard score comes on as barely a whisper. The camera keeps rolling, the shot becomes uncomfortably long, and I couldn’t help but start thinking whether Clooney (or Clayton) was now making a shopping list in his head for dinner that night. Eggs? Butter? Brussels sprouts? No, no, maybe something lighter, like asparagus… The forced subtlety of the shot, which is supposed to blow you away with its gentleness, is indicative of the film as a whole—not a terrible thing in post-Aronofsky cinema, but agenda-driven, just the same.

Clayton works best as a potboiler, not a character study—not only is Clayton more of a movie type than the film seems to want to admit, Tilda Swinton’s nervy sweat-pile is entirely ludicrous. Gilroy identifies her solely by her clothes (twice…twice , he has her fussing over her smart suits and presentation as a shortcut to character; Swinton sells the inherent sexism of the scene, but you never see Clooney, Pollack, or any of the film’s other men obsessing over how they look before a scene), and then couches it as an expression of her psychological makeup. It’s a fun little film, and yes, I wish Hollywood made more films in this vein of storytelling, but there’s nothing groundbreaking here on any micro level.

At a moment in history where Iran, famously dubbed one-third of an "Axis of Evil" by Dubya, has again been making headlines as the next country with whom the Republicans wanna preemptively rumble (though the NIE's latest report on its lack of a nuclear weapons program throws this political gambit into a tailspin), Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical and surpassingly exquisite Persepolis, co-written and directed with fellow comic book artist Vincent Paronnaud, is a corrective bomb of beauty launched lovingly into a terrified world. Based upon Satrapi's likewise superlative graphic novels and detailing her upbringing in Iran and eventual departure to (and return from) Austria amidst the Islamic Revolution, the personal-is-political telling deconstructs the absolute Otherness attributed to Iranians in an era scarred by boys who cry terrorist, even as the film rises to the status of coming-of-age classic.

Click here to read Kristi Mitsuda's review of Persepolis.

PLUS: Click here to read Reverse Shot staff writer Nick Pinkerton's review of Persepolis in the Village Voice.

Critics have been singling out for praise something that has come to be known as The Shot in Atonement—in which director Joe Wright surveys WWII’s Dunkirk evacuation (when more than 300,000 British and French soldiers were rescued from German attack) as a lengthy, five-minute-plus single take—and no surprise there: it sticks out like a sore thumb. A film ostensibly about multiple perspectives, Atonement is edited and stylized to a not-nauseating-but-still-vaguely-insulting degree—gratuitously lit interiors, self-consciously arch framing of characters, attenuated sequences of crosscutting. Whenever there’s a point to be made, Wright makes it ten times over, until there’s no doubt that the audience…really…gets…it. So, the already celebrated Dunkirk single take, in which James McAvoy’s wounded soldier solemnly wanders throughout a richly color-drained tableau of well-manicured dread, seems completely aesthetically opposed to the rest of the film.

Because the visual strategy is so foregrounded, the entire sequence exudes an undeniable whiff of “look at me” stunt making. Wright seems to care much less about the mess of war and the stench of death than the ability of the camera to drift through and, more importantly, above it. He choreographs the thing like it’s on a very predetermined roller coaster track. Conveniently placed miseries abound as McAvoy’s tourist and audience surrogate watches the chaos unfold on the beach: horses are shot through the head and fall to the ground, men drunkenly cavort on a destroyed merry-go-round, a chorus of solemn, prideful soldiers sing along in harmony with the score, and in the distance a gloriously hazy Ferris wheel looms like death itself (I didn’t notice, but after the film, a friend told me a silhouetted figure was hanging off of it, flailing spastically—a world spun out of control indeed).

Of course, Wright’s ultra-aestheticized approach to his Big War Sequence shouldn’t surprise, since earlier in the film he tracks out from McAvoy’s speechless countenance to take in the horror of a country field littered with the bodies of sweet-faced school girls shot discreetly in the forehead (for sheer beauty, it’s the most bald-facedly gorgeous vision of violent wartime death in a “serious” film since Benigni lit a pile of concentration camp corpses as though it were a shimmering Christmas tree.) It’s unfair to morally prize one aesthetic approach over another (of course, Spielberg’s in-your-face vérité reinvention of cinematic warmaking in Saving Private Ryan was as overly strategized as any of Wright’s well-composed frames), but Wright’s grandstanding in this sequence bespeaks of a decidedly disjointed approach, as well as disappoints after his gloriously measured 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which smartly employed the long take as a coherent, unifying device. Atonement’s generally muddled storytelling may be the film’s biggest failing (the central conceit is far too literary to truly adapt to the screen), but the tonally awkward Dunkirk moment, which admits a great deal of self-satisfaction in its design, shows how desperately, awkwardly this hollow tale is reaching, grasping for a soul.

The gimmick of Adam Rifkin's forgettable Look is that it's comprised entirely of footage from surveillance cameras, or at least footage from cameras meant to simulate surveillance cameras. So guess what happens in its very first scene? Two teenage girls strip and cavort in a clothing store dressing room! Doesn't that just shock and arouse you? Allow you to see private events you weren't meant to see while also forcing you to question your own motivations for watching them? No?

This scene and Look as a whole don't fly because Rifkin's film operates, firstly, under a flawed principle and, secondly, flubs any sort of competent execution. The major problem is that Rifkin, writer and director of The Chase and Detroit Rock City, and since consigned to the lower echelons of Hollywood fare like National Lampoon's Homo Erectus, misunderstands the implications of our contemporary surveillance society. It's not enough to show people engaging in outrageous, stupid, illicit, or illegal behavior when they think nobody's looking—scenes of managers screwing their employees in the storeroom, students seducing teachers, and coworkers playing nasty practical jokes may be funny or titillating, but they fail to enlighten us about the increasing ubiquity of technology designed to monitor both the public and private sphere.

Click here for the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Look.

Francis Ford Coppola has been quietly touting Youth Without Youth, his first film in a decade, as a return to his independent roots, an experimental project for which he once again became a "student of cinema." It's a nice thought, one thematically linked to the film in its evocation of regeneration, as well as a possible self defense for such a foolhardy endeavor -- yet for all Coppola's possibly false modesty, the delightful fact remains that Youth Without Youth could only be the work of a seasoned master. In fact, opaque and challenging though it may be, and even if it was shot cheaply and on the fly in Romania, Coppola's new film isn't so unlike many of the director's other works in terms of its radical visionary charms. Even at his admittedly small moments, Coppola can't help but think big, and Youth Without Youth is nothing if not an eloquent expression of the director's grandiose dreams for a philosophy of cinema, inextricable, of course, from time, consciousness, and memory.

One can't help but wonder, with Mike Newell's woebegone Love in the Time of Cholera currently disappearing from theaters, what Coppola might be able to do with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's prose: like that author's work, this film hovers outside of time, while remaining beholden to a maddeningly destructive linearity. Coppola, his longtime editor Walter Murch, and his first-time collaborators, cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., and composer Osvaldo Golijov, expand time and also stay within its fixed boundaries, creating an overwhelming tapestry of images, sounds, and feelings that comes closer to what Raul Ruiz achieved with his ephiphanic Proust retelling Time Regained than anything in recent American cinema.

Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of Youth Without Youth.

Kaycee Moore (above) was thrilled when she heard Killer of Sheep was Time Magazine's third best movie of 2007.

From Richard Corliss's top 10 of 2007 in Time:
#3. Killer of Sheep
Completed in 1977 and virtually unseen since.... As the children play games in the post-apocalyptic rubble of Watts, the man's emotional exhaustion abrades against the woman's sexual yearning. This is surely the finest, most uncompromising film by a black director.

That's right: the "finest film...by a black director" (note: NOT "black American") is the third best movie of the year behind No Country for Old Men and The Lives of Others. Sorry Spike Lee and Ousmane Sembene, you've made some good movies, but nothing quite as good as The Lives of Others.

Seriously -- does anybody edit this stuff?

P.S. "Post-apocalyptic?"

"Arranged," the film itself and the story behind its conception, makes for a feel-good holiday story. Inspired by the experiences of Yuta Silverman, Arranged was written by Stefan Schaefer after he met with the young Orthodox Jewish woman, who had no previous connections to the New York film world, and decided the tale of her experiences finding a husband through traditional matchmaking was one worth telling. Co-directed by Schaefer and partner Diane Crespo, the final film evidences intimate knowledge of its subject, and even if it waters down that knowledge with pat nods to mainstream fare, it still maintains genuine integrity as a story of lives lived very much outside the norm.

Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Arranged,

Right off the bat, there are two telltale signs in the Hollywood adaptation of The Kite Runner that portend the safe, diluted entertainment about to unfold. Perhaps nervous that a prestige drama mostly told in the Afghani language of Dari, and headlined by a cast of unknown middle-Eastern actors, might not sell to the multiplexes, the producers have inserted a fancy, interminable credit sequence, backed by Alberto Iglesias's overly insistent, lute-heavy score, and adorned with some faux-Persian, animated curlicues. Then it's straight to the English-language San Francisco prologue, flatly filmed to look like any anonymous American studio project: kites flying at the beach, happy couple walking hand in hand. Soon enough, thirtysomething protagonist Amir, opening a package to find his newly published book, a la George McFly in Back to the Future, is flashing back to the apparently halcyon days of pre-Taliban Afghanistan.

Here, in 1978, Marc Forster devotes much screen time to the relatively universal trivialities of childhood, like watching glorious American movies and, of course, flying colorful kites -- in another desperate attempt to grab the attention of an American audience possibly lulled by the traditional storytelling and proliferation of on-screen foreigners, the latter is rendered in intolerable, remarkably unconvincing CGI, as kites swoop and dip, and their apparently razor-sharp strings go mano a mano in goofy, impossible close-up. These sequences are the pandering tipping point for a film that actually might have coasted on its serviceable storytelling skills: on a narrative basis, Forster and screenwriter David Benioff keep things moving briskly and fluidly, and the actors are emotionally compelling enough that it's easy, in the moment, to overlook the film's central thematic dubiousness and specious cultural elisions.

Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of The Kite Runner.

Though it's both a predictable culture-clash comedy and a gentle plea for people of different political backgrounds to "just get along," The Band's Visit nevertheless manages to use its central contrivances and inevitable cliches to its favor, and becomes something ethereal and winning. This debut from Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin, in which the soft-spoken members of an Egyptian brass band (the stodgy Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, to be precise) find themselves stranded in a small Israeli town on the way to a gig, parlays its initial good-natured dullness into surprisingly robust drama. Kolirin's schematics, both in its narrative turns and its overtly stylized compositions, threaten to reduce politics to bromides -- yet the filmmaker is wonderfully keyed into the subtleties of human behavior, and evinces a splendid love for all of his characters that borders on infectious adoration. The Band's Visit may wear its quaintness too much on its sleeve, but for a dose of what is essentially movie medicine, it goes down awfully easily.

Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of The Band's Visit.

"Like OMG, are we in a Wes Anderson movie?!?"

The hype machine is chugging along at full speed for "Juno," and it's amazing what a little festival attention can do. A well-timed Telluride premiere, to an already almost legendarily appreciative audience, was soon followed by Toronto and Austin unveilings, all of which led award pundits and Entertainment Weekly columnists to mark it as a Serious Oscar Contender. Fox Searchlight, who proved irritably savvy when it came to promoting its surprise Academy magnet "Little Miss Sunshine" last year, now can position "Juno" as the designated underdog of choice -- that "little" movie that seemingly came out of nowhere, that was directed by that guy who had that buzzy debut "Thank You for Smoking," and, did you hear, was written by that ex-stripper, one-time phone-sex operator, and all-around New Voice in Cinema, Diablo Cody. Shrewd marketing, and Cody's tantalizing, oft trotted-out bio, may make "Juno" the flavor of the season, yet, taking a step back from the hype, it's hard not to feel like this aggressively clever, ultimately sentimental high-school comedy is less true seasonal counter-programming than just another Hollywood wolf in indie sheep clothing. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review.

Don't forget the Elbert Ventura take up on the main site.

We didn't like Thank You For Smoking either.

Paul Schrader's fascination with life's seamier underside continues in The Walker, whose titular character, Carter Page III is something of a latter-day incarnation of Richard Gere's American gigolo. He escorts bored, rich wives around town but, this time, he's effectively neutered: "Car" is gay (though aside from a few chaste forehead pecks and a single kiss shared with his supposedly hot-for-him boyfriend, you wouldn't know it), and trades on his Wildean (he wishes) wit rather than orgasms, a Washington D.C.-set Will for any Grace to hire. Schrader's final entry into the so-called "night worker" or "lonely man" saga, loosely beginning with his Taxi Driver script for Scorsese and crystallized in writing-directing combos American Gigolo and later Light Sleeper, sees the filmmaker reworking the same movie again, but without illuminative expansion or revision--save for a more downbeat ending--and so the gesture goes wasted.

The Walker, as per its predecessors, features a male protagonist (leadenly played by Woody Harrelson) who makes a tax-free living, gets mixed up in a crime, and follows the beacon of redemption--real or imagined--shone by a woman at the center (this time around played by Kristin Scott Thomas). Click here to read Kristi Mitsuda's review of The Walker.

Like its protagonist, Jennifer Venditti's acclaimed documentary Billy the Kid is both pretty hard to dislike and difficult to parse. It's already scooped up awards at Edinburgh, Los Angeles, and South by Southwest film festivals, and it's easy to see why: this compelling, ingratiating portrait of some days in the life of a charming and troubled fifteen-year-old New Englander, with its canny intimacy and sharp editing, manages to be up-close-and-personal as well as safely discreet. Venditti, following around the not-quite-outcast teenager Billy vérité-style, is inoffensive in her intrusion, yet also manages to make the boy a compelling screen presence. What the film lacks in painful revelation it makes up for in the way it avoids exploiting its subject; and, refreshingly, in these days when most documentaries seem couched in meta-commentary, the film never falls back on the crutch of having the filmmaker's ethical dilemma as a pivotal plot thrust.Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of Billy the Kid.

In a recent Atlantic Monthly essay, Michael Hirschorn sniffed at the prevailing sensibility in indie-hipster culture. “We’re drowning in quirk,” Hirschorn wrote, worrying that the ethos had made virtues of insularity and weightlessness. The diagnosis was astute, even if the net was cast too wide. (Lump in Arrested Development and The Royal Tenenbaums with Napoleon Dynamite and Garden State? I don’t think so.) Hirschorn called quirk the “embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream,” but that definition doesn’t quite get at the problem. For it’s not the embrace of odd that he was railing against, it’s the dumbing-down of it. In the movies, contemporary quirk has become less about opposing the mainstream but being accepted by it. The quirk-mongers of Indiewood, the worst offenders of them all, have drained the words “eccentric” and “weird” of all meaning. They have accomplished what mainstream culture normally does: they have banalized the marginal and the offbeat.

Enter Jason Reitman’s Juno. It arrives in theaters with a formidable aura of buzz and inevitability. Telluride and Toronto screenings played to enthusiastic crowds. Critics and journalists have been whipping out their thesauri to find new ways to say “edgy,” “hip,” and, yes, “quirky.” The sell job has been impressive: an interview with Ellen Page on Pitchfork, word-of-mouth screenings in select cities, and the sudden ubiquity of Diablo Cody, the former stripper-turned-blogger-turned-bestseller—talk about a publicist’s dream bio—now tipped as a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination for screenplay. But lest we be distracted from the movie’s merits by its hype, let’s state for the record: Juno is occasionally funny, rarely intelligent, and often annoying. A crowd-pleaser for people who like to think they’re above crowd-pleasers but are actually not, it’s going to be huge.
Click here to read all of Elbert Ventura's full review of Juno.