Hey Nate,
I think we’d have a good time talking about movies. I wish that you could couch your aesthetic arguments in ways that didn’t assume a total lack of knowledge or thought on the part of people who disagree with you. I know a lot about movie and directing and all that stuff. I’ve thought a lot about it, I talk about it with other people who enjoy that aspect of film-making, and I disagree with you about Juno.

Remi,

I think that’s a fair request. Juno made me really angry… in fact, all of us (save MTB) who saw the movie left it in extremely bilious moods and it took about half an hour of drinking and food before we were able to stop being angry and sarcastic about anything we said. I wrote the post still very much in that mind, and, now that I’m considering your comment, wonder if I could have achieved some of the same catharsis and expressed my opinion just as well by describing more of that experience, rather on focusing on a claim about what all people ought to think which, as you point out, is sure to be disagreed with.

I’ll try to keep that in mind in the future.

Hey, my main response was to y’alls’ biliousness, not to defend the movie. If you see something merely very bad, and not wicked, it seems like torturing yourself to bother going over it again in speech. Especially right afterwards. The movie ends, there’s relief, and I try to prolong the relief by changing the subject and trying to forget it as soon as possible.

Some kinds of badness are interesting, but others deserve only to be ignored.

[To continue our temperamental disagreement over which are better to eat more of, movies or books, at least when you begin a bad book you can throw it down after a chapter with a clear conscience. A movie takes only an easy two hours, and it’s hard just to get up and leave the mesmerizing screen. Ending the connection, when the badness stops, the natural reaction is bile, annoyance, easy disdain. Whereas if you’ve invested hours and hours in reading a book, and you disagree with it, or think it’s bad, and still keep going, your reaction is necessarily slower, and less straight-up bilious. Bile isn’t terrible, and I think you and Hb can handle it better than I can, and be less affected by it over all, but I can’t stand it, because it takes so long to get the taste out of my mouth. I like peaceful calm.]

I’ll just add that the script was really bad, and I blame the direction less than Nate did, because it was trying to work around lines that were written as one-liners, not as parts of conversations. For the first third of the movie, every character had the same voice—the author’s. That voice was trying way too hard to be clever and punk rock in that pushy Midwestern way, so obviously so that I thought for a while the movie had to be promising some sort of self-awakening of these characters to the fact that they were faking it. Nope, that’s actually the intended and admired voice, whose overwrought tones eventually settle into the main character’s mouth for most of the time (until they jump into her stepmother’s, and briefly another character’s). There are affecting moments in the movie, but the script deserves none of the credit, since the lines get in the way of the genuineness Ebert found to be redeeming. But Nate rightly pointed out that these points of human meaning were just as affecting as if someone had described them, not because they happened to occur in this movie.

I’m not so surprised by your disliking the movie (I can’t say that I would have anticipated one way or the other, really) as I am by the unanimity among your party. The depth of feeling — the “biliousness” — is really something, I guess, but most interesting to me is that not a one of you could muster anything more positive to say than “merely bad.” Not a one! How could this be? Is the movie so awful? You cite Ebert as a claimant in its favor, but of course we could take him or leave him. A quick look over at Rottentomatoes reveals a 93% positive rating — maybe too high, actually (such failure to provoke or alienate any viewers suggests a bland pretty-goodness, and I find there’s a tomato sweet-spot for new releases somewhere in the 70s or 80s percent). Clicking over to their “Top Critics,” whatever that means, one finds a 100% positive rating! Fully 32 of 32 allegedly credible “experts” give the movie at least marginally positive reviews. I won’t appeal to consensus as evidence of virtue, of course, or look to it for clarity on truth, but the profundity of divergence here is curious.

We all know by now that the Oscar nominations and awards are something of a modified crap shoot, and we could debate the insight or acuity of particular critics, but is the entire professional movie reviewing establishment so starkly and utterly divorced from what the Monadology crew values in cinema? Really?

From what I recall of past reviews here, I wouldn’t have thought so. I’m not about to make an Excel sheet to plot the correlation between the Tomato-meter and x/5-monad reviews, but I think the praises here seem more often than not to be highest for “establishment” middle- to high-brow flicks, or those generally-recognized-by-people-who-should-know underappreciated gems. I would expect to find some outliers, no doubt, but I can hardly imagine finding zero correlation, much less a negative one.

So what’s the deal with Juno? Was something in the popcorn?

These days I’m not seeing a lot of even-slightly-out-of-the-mainstream movies before the hype builds, or even until Netflix (present circumstances, etc.), but I did luck out to see Juno over the holidays before I had heard much about it. I didn’t really expect much except a “quirky” and ironic deadpan comedy aimed at more-or-less exactly my demographic, insofar as I can admit to having one — I know a lot of the hipper-than-hips have started snarking over “quirk,” but I figure they finally got my number and there’s no use fightin’ it (I know I’ll at least get a good soundtrack out of the deal). But with low or middling expectations, I was surprised by how much I liked the movie. I liked it quite a lot.

It’s hard to account for why my initial response was so different from all of yours. Maybe the difference in expectation is the whole story. If you thought you were going to see Ebert’s best movie of the year, I am not surprised that you’d be disappointed. It’s possible, I guess, that I have a more inclusive idea of what a good movie can be, but I don’t want to assume that.

(I mean, Love Actually is saccharine and absurd, but for saccharine and absurd it’s not that bad, and it even has moments of human depth and beauty (I’m thinking of Emma Thompson’s character); favoring the precious over the true, absolutely, but “deeply offensive”? You’re crazy or exaggerating.)

A central charge in this thread seems to be that the movie lacks conversation, or conversation of some particular qualities, and for the most part I am not inclined to refute that; but neither do I think movies generally or this movie in particular are centrally about conversation; I don’t think (and perhaps you would agree) that there is any necessity of their even being “word” things, if you catch my meaning.

The “word” things in this movie are often stilted, as you all seem to have noted. I didn’t feel the sort of excitement in the first fifteen minutes that I felt in those minutes of Little Miss Sunshine, either. I wavered between somewhat amused and somewhat annoyed. There are, incidentally, several allusions to this in the blurbs displayed on Rottentomatoes, interspersed with some (too-glowing) claims of flawlessness and pitch-perfectness: “Dialogue and pic overall are saved from cloying glibness by the fact that Juno is not only a smarty-pants, but also genuinely smart and self-possessed,” and “It takes Juno about 15 minutes to calm down and get its joke reflex in check,” and “The film’s forced quirkiness constantly threatens to derail the entire enterprise.” In the only of the reviews I actually read beyond the blurbs, A.O. Scott says, “At first her sarcasm is bracing and also a bit jarring,” and “The first time I saw ‘Juno,’ I was shocked to find myself tearing up at the end, since I’d spent the first 15 minutes or so gnashing my teeth and checking my watch. The passive-aggressive pseudo-folk songs, the self-consciously clever dialogue, the generic, instantly mockable suburban setting [… .]”

It’s been long enough now since I saw the movie that I’m not terribly comfortable reading very far into its details, but the my most memorable impression, the thing I think I was most surprised and impressed by, was that literally every single character who was on screen long enough for me to remember now seemed in the end to be respected by the movie as genuine and human, however plainly flawed, and I came away somehow sympathetic to them all.

Maybe expectation was key here, again. I was fully expecting after seeing the trailer that the Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner characters would be cardboard props for yuppie-hating hipster derision. Even after Bateman shows off his cred and, it seemed to me, not thoughtlessly provoked some reflection on what selling oneself out might actually mean, it seemed so easy for Garner to be the suburban villain. But she’s not left to seem that way. The impression her husband initially gave of collected adulthood turns out to be a facade, and there’s some sorrow and sure enough some patheticness to it, but also a strange kind of respectability to their mutual realization of his immaturity. He’s kind of an immature dumbass, it turns out, but it’s not the sort of thing he’s going to fix by the time the movie ends, not without slaying some dragons first, and they both seem to understand it, and to do what they think they must, correctly or not, in order to be true to themselves and as decent as they can be to each other.

And Juno does about as well as she can do to deal with something “way above her maturity level” or whatever the line is, and then kind of has to do her best (with great difficulty, I think) to go back to being a kid, because what else can she be?

It seems like everybody pretty much has to be what they are, and has to endure some tumult to figure out what that is. I’m afraid I might be making it sound somewhat better than I believe it to be, but I was expecting something close to nothing and got at least somewhat more than that.

And a P.S.,
As one who is in favor of the continued legality of (some) abortion, I nevertheless find it a positive cultural phenomenon that two recent big movies I’ve seen portray characters who explicitly address abortion and who, without seeming politically or socially conservative, intimate or demonstrate objections of conscience to it.

Like Robbie, I was a bit surprised at the vitriol in your original reaction to the movie, Nate. I can see the accusation of quippiness, but I didn’t think the problem was universal (the scene in which Juno tells her folks about the pregnancy, as well as several of her scenes with the Michael Cera character, seemed like noteworthy exceptions). I happened on some free passes to a screening back in December - before I’d heard much hype, and it was just a chance for an inexpensive evening at the movies - and must admit to having had a pretty good time.

Robbie,

For me, I expect the anticipation did play a role. “Best” from Ebert has coincided with a lot of movies I find profound. But honestly my reaction was a lot like that portion of A. O. Scott’s review you quoted. I did sort of tear up at points (not the ending sequence) and, like Mike, I did like most of the scenes between Juno and Michael Cera. Those were the most simply written, and seemed (at least on Cera’s part) to convey actual human emotions, not simply posturing of figures. But, mostly, I was affected by stuff that the movie was pointing to, not the situations happening to its characters within its plot.

Robbie points to the reversal of expectations, especially with the step-parents, as a reason why he was pleasantly surprised by the movie. Indeed, I was relieved to find that those characters did not play into the expectations the movie tried hard to develop in me for plastic, fake people. But the reversal was skin deep, at best. At least for the Jason Bateman character I can imagine an excuse: people who are abandoned don’t really get a chance to know the abandoners, so I can understand why there’s effectively nothing done to explain or explore why he’s such a dick. I mean, we all can fill in explanations, sure, but the movie’s entirely uninterested in looking at him as anything other than an agent of harm. He’s plastic in another direction, just an unexpected one. Similarly, Jennifer Garner’s character: we can postulate that she’s not the control freak and does care about motherhood, why, exactly? Sure, we can sort of see it, sort of guess at, “oh yeah, she actually wants to be a mom.” But, again, no effort is taken to figure out why she does what she does.

Now, one might say, “that’s the point. They’re people acting fakely, but for forgivable reasons. They’re caught up in bad situations, don’t know what to do, and so they arrive at an impasse.” But I don’t demand that these people be good, just that the moviemaker understand them and portray them as people. Woody Allen’s characters, just as an example, are seldom good, but I ache with their pains and desires as I watch them, and so know intimately why they do bad things (or nothing at all). Michael Bateman’s is a throw-away character. “He’s a loser who hasn’t grown up.” “He’s a dick with a mid-life crisis.” That’s all one can say about him, and it does a disservice to the movie’s audience as human beings to say, “it’s okay to treat human beings that way, in art, let alone life.” That bugged me, at least.

Further, one might say, “but these people aren’t Juno, and she’s the eponymous hero, so we’re supposed to be learning about her.” Oh yeah? The central character’s central crisis is caused by Bateman’s character. Why does she cry in the minivan? That’s the big moment, right? And we’re not going to have her interact with a real character to produce that?

Of course, that’s far from the worst problem, but rather points to it: is Juno a real character? What’s she learning? Does she learn it? The movie sure seems to set us up for something, and even has Juno say something about it at the end (the “events way beyond my maturity level” comment). We can toss stuff out there: that there are bigger things than she is. That she’s not so tough after all. That Bleeker likes her. But really, that’s it?

By the way, isn’t it a little suspicious that this character, who picks up on the absurdity of the phrase “sexually active” in one of the movie’s biggest riffs, drops such a hugely meaningless phrase to describe the movie’s events? What, pray tell, is a maturity level? To me, it seems like Juno and her alter-ego, the screenwriter, just give up on understanding what’s happened. And I don’t mean understanding, as in, having words to describe something, or “knowing something intellectually.” I mean the sense that allows poets to observe something closely and to reproduce that thing in art. It’s an extremely precise and thoroughgoing capacity, at least for good ones, no? It seemed like only a little time was spent in this activity, and that really only on understanding Cera’s character, and even then, the point was telegraphed from the very beginning, just to make sure we saw it (“hey, he actually likes her”).

For all its reputed quirkiness, the movie seemed pretty Hollywood to me. Wooden, unthinking script resulting in a movie that tugged a few heartstrings to no effect. I wasn’t that mad at the time, and I’m not now; bile did seem appropriate, though, since walking out, I had a bad taste in my mouth.

I don’t have much more time to give tonight or maybe for the remainder of the week, but briefly, I think I liked and sympathized with the characters more, and expectations surely did have a lot to do with that.

The comparison to Woody Allen is insightful for how silly it is to me. This isn’t Woody Allen. Maybe it approaches in some respects the least of Woody Allen, which are maybe merely good (or less) as movies but bad as Woody Allen. I can surely name several movies I’ve seen in the last month that I think were better.

I didn’t hate the Jason Bateman character. He’s pathetic in a way, but I felt for him, and I believed him as a human person. Pathetic as his condition was, it caused him to be trapped and unhappy, and I think abandoned is the wrong word — his condition is pathetic but real, and he may be minimizing the trauma it causes his wife.

For all the hipster derision of the suburban caricature, this is exactly what Juno wants for her child. She surely could have found some more “non-traditional” parents, but this set is perfect. The hipster mocks it, but paradoxically believes in its goodness, of its rightness for children, so much so that the great crisis you identify is precipitated by her realizing its fragility.

I don’t have much time for a response, either, as I have to head to work soon.

For all of the praise of Cera’s character, I think the extend of its virtues are these: it’s an attractive and slightly unusual character sketch, and Cera does a good awkward/sincere act. Because his acting is, in fact, better than much of what happens around him, we declare his character more worthwhile. Frankly, his character was done nothing by the script, which relied upon Cera to imply more than he ever got to say. In a good movie, he would’ve been a yawning emptiness.

I find myself continually at odds with the “expectation” model for understanding the interaction of people with movies. It’s been propagated by almost everyone I’ve ever talked with about film, but I suspect it to be misleading and unhelpful. If what one means, for instance, is that there is a problem with mislabeling, I think I can agree. Surely it’s a problem to try to enjoy a comedy if one attempts to understand it as a drama, or to enjoy a long, quiet piece about human nature if one expects or demands a cheerful romp. But these distinctions become confused and obscure when one deals with better art. (What genre do Wes Anderson films fit into, again?)

It takes a lot of imagination for me to dream up a situation where my lowered expectations could allow me to enjoy Juno. (Perhaps if the alternative were physical torture?) In art, bad is pain, and works of art set their own expectation level: the more adept they are at pointing specifically to their own intentions, the more efficacious, for good or for ill, is their substance. Juno was sharp and particular enough to allow for no breezy enjoyment of its good points and easy dismissal of its poor ones.

You scoff at HB’s comparison to Woody Allen, but to me it seems rather appropriate. Allen is famous for being simultaneously funny, entertaining, insightful, and profound. All of these virtues were claimed for Juno by one critic or another on that front page of Rotten Tomatoes. Allen is, moreover, a useful example because his virtues are so undeniable. I don’t really see the problem with using Allen as a metric by which to understand what good movies really do.

Ultimately, I think the most damning thing about the movie was the combination of narratorial transparency (as HB mentioned) and the shallowness of narratorial insight. That, I might arrogantly venture to suggest, could explain why so many people with “lower expectations” reacted less negatively to the film. Lower expectations may translate into less careful attention and less focus, bringing with them the enviable possibility of missing the narratorial voice entirely. (It’s hard for me not to believe that many people simply miss a lot of the things I perceive in movies, since I was myself that person for many years. I similarly believe that other people may be talking about things I wasn’t even equipped to take in.)

(P.S. I fully defend my charge that Love Actually is every bit as terrible as I intimated. To say that its faults are merely in its being “saccharine” is, I think, very much to miss the point. I’m happy to explain at length, but have no wish to foist such an explanation upon the uninterested.)

The comparison to Woody Allen is insightful for how silly it is to me. This isn’t Woody Allen. Maybe it approaches in some respects the least of Woody Allen, which are maybe merely good (or less) as movies but bad as Woody Allen. I can surely name several movies I’ve seen in the last month that I think were better.

I thought about making another prophylactic argument when I wrote the comparison, and I see it would have been helpful. Surely it’s possible to use Woody Allen’s characterizations as an example of good characterization, without comparing Juno to Woody Allen’s entire oeuvre, no? That’s what I meant to do: to say that I want real people to inhabit this movie. Woody Allen tends to people his movies with real people. So do others. These folks didn’t.

But, more generally, I’m troubled a bit by making Woody Allen a genre, or subset of good movies, to which it’s unfair to compare others. I mean, I know that it’s tempting to make someone with such a clear style into a subcategory, but I just don’t think it’s an accurate way to judge the medium. “Juno’s not doing good Woody Allen, but that’s not what it’s trying to do, so it’s not fair to judge it against that standard.” I’d rather just judge them both against what makes a good movie, since I don’t see the real distinction between Allen and good. Anyway, not a huge point, and you were admittedly writing in haste, so perhaps I misunderstood what you meant.

As to Robbie’s answers of the questions posed: I think these are probably about the best (most charitable?) apologies for the movie possible. One can feel for Bateman’s character, sure, but is the movie really giving us reason to? He’s a man-child, the movie says, whose shirts are stupid and who will go off to live in a loft in the Twin Cities (and this movie sure does bring the Midwestern backbiting self-hate, doesn’t it?). He doesn’t understand the harm he’s causing, or willfully ignores it. Why? Well, we can fill in a lot on our own, sure, and I can spin out tons about why some men do these things that end up making them abandoners (I’ve got to stick with that term, because that’s what it feels like from the side the movie’s taking). But the movie doesn’t think enough to give any depth or specificity to him. Maybe that’s accurate, one might say. Lord knows plenty of people are being told by religion and psychobabble and no-fault divorce these days not to look closely at failure and pain. People do act this way, do try to become unknowable and plastic. I’ve met some people who look like Bateman’s character. Not to harp on a point we agree on, I’m sure, but human beings, even if they look plastic, aren’t, and just throwing them out there as though they were is bad.

So, Juno’s a movie about a hipster realizing that suburban, or maybe just wedded, bliss doesn’t exist? Okay. That just doesn’t seem like it really needs saying, or at least, I’m not that interested in hearing it, since it’s pretty obvious that a lot of the things we take as solid are just empty words. The comparison to seeing through such phrases as “sexually active” comes to mind: reality’s a lot more complicated than neat categories make it. To me, if that’s the best one can do to apologize for it, Juno’s story seems to me essentially comprehended by this exchange from Rushmore:

RC: Do you think we’re going to have sex?
MF: That’s a kind of cheap way to put it.
RC: Not if you’ve ever fucked before, it isn’t.

To forestall misunderstanding: I’m making no comment on the characters of Robbie or others who enjoyed the movie by saying any of this. All is meant in kindness and friendship.

In response to Nate’s comments, I know that my reactions remain pretty well conditioned by expectations, not labeling, although I’m realizing the extent to which this may be a personal reaction. I’ll try to spell it out. I hope I don’t sound like a snob (and I know that’s pretty much a dead hope around here), because I really don’t mean any reflection on anyone else, but I just am not really interested in seeing movies that aren’t pretty damn good. Mediocrity doesn’t interest me, and when I choose to see it, I feel kind of icky. So, as much as I like Michael Cera, I’m pretty much never going to see Superbad. I asked for Zoolander to be shut off after 20 minutes ‘cause I didn’t find it funny. I don’t go see or rent movies that I’ll think are going to be merely “well done” and I pretty much avoid comedies unless I get very specific recommendations. As I’ve said around here before, I’m ambivalent about this tendency in myself: it’s fine not to be too democratic, but I know I come off like a stick in the mud. I just don’t like releasing myself to stories that don’t feel worth it. Again, no reflection intended on others, etc. It just molds my expectations: I kind of expect excellence all the time. The more one has to do to say, “okay, this is good, you know, in parts; but you’ll like it anyway,” the less likely I am to want to watch it. So, Little Miss Sunshine: pleasant, the script held together, Steve Carrell’s got great delivery, and I remember fondly the portraits of desperate people under ugly circumstances. Would I ever choose to watch it again on my own? No. With friends? Maybe, but again, not suited to my disposition, especially.

As for Juno, I simply wouldn’t have seen it if it hadn’t gotten good reviews from people I respect. Having its, at best, mediocrity set off against my possibly heightened expectations for excellence certainly has led me to expend far more time on it than perhaps it’s worth (thanks for the reality check, Mary). So to that extent the expectations made my response disproportionate. But I guess I’ve never been comfortable going into a movie saying, “Well, I expect it to be ok, and if it’s ok, I’ll be satisfied.”

So, that’s how expectations seem to me to work.

In art, bad is pain

I hope you’ll talk a bit at some point about this, Nate. And whatever corresponds to it when you see something you love.

In the aggregate, we have very similar taste in movies. (We disagree here, but as I’ve said elsewhere, I have sympathy for people who hated Juno. I nearly walked out after the first ten minutes.) But I don’t follow your 1 or 5 monad reviews well at all, even when I’d rate the reviewed movie about the same way. I understand a little better now why - I think. I don’t respond like that to movies very often, or for very long when I do. And when I go to scribble about them, whatever charged response I may have had has gone, or lost most of its force.

Expectations work for me much like they do for HB. Especially as I’ve gotten more and more particular and watched fewer and fewer movies per year. Back in the days of cheap cable TV and $1 rentals at the local video stores I’d watch 200+ movies a year. Now it’s about 20, and I want those 20 to be damn good.

I didn’t think setting the movie in the Twin Cities was essential (I almost forgot about the location - all I distinctly remember is Suburbia, U.S.A.), and I’m not following hb’s “Midwestern” references. The Juno characters reminded me more of some people I met at St. John’s than of people I knew back in the Midwest. Maybe that’s neither here nor there.

I do think Juno is a movie Ebert was bound to love. He’s given a lot of three star reviews to pedestrian movies he’d rate two stars but for the redeeming presence of a character who could plausibly say “I love you” by leaving someone a mailbox full of Tic-Tacs. Ebert didn’t rate by Tic-Tacs alone I reckon, but gestures like that have loomed large in his reviewing for as long as I can remember.

HB: I haven’t seen the movie, and I don’t really plan to. However, I am intrigued by what the “pushy Midwestern way” of being “clever and punk rock” is. I’m wondering how it’s related, if at all, to “Midwestern backbiting self-hate,” which sounds like a polemical way of phrasing a phenomenon that I am familiar with. The former, however, could use some illustration/explanation—we Midwesterners have our social flaws, but I don’t generally associate them with words like “pushy,” “clever,” or “punk rock.”

I’m not asking defensively; it’s hard for us to see these things sometimes, and I am open to the possibility that these are meaningful cultural phenomena.

On the Midwestern things, let’s be clear, I may have lived on the East Coast for 20-plus years, and my family’s origins may trace their way here way back when, but my origins and habits are mostly Midwestern in origin (Ohio in particular). So, when I talk about the region, even if I may not pull it off, I mean to speak with kind understanding. And, I hope, not too much back-biting. Yeah, yeah, no one believes me. But meet my parents, it’s true.

The first description (pushy, punk rock) is influenced, I must somewhat shamefully admit, by this interview with the script’s author. But I assure you that the same qualities are in the movie (and it’s not hard to make comparison’s between Ms Cody and the authorial voice I found unpleasant in the first third of the movie). Let me be clear: she seems like a perfectly nice person. But the main character, and the entire aesthetic of the movie, is just trying too hard to be cool. And the coolest thing imaginable to her is punk rock. At the same time, Juno can’t escape her love of pushing people’s buttons by making cutting observations and terribly witty remarks about everything. That’s the pushy. I call it Midwestern because the specific attitude can only arise in this place where people feel coolness to be impossible and appreciate sharp but accurate commentary about themselves. Or sharp in that way Garrison Keillor’s commentary can be. Anyway, it’s something you can quite get anywhere else. In the South, there’s more cultural resistance to punk rock the cool in general, and a different relation to the truth from the Midwestern.

As to the back-biting: I meant the ultrasound scene in particular, although it comes up in a couple other places. Remember when the ultimate tell-off to that technician is that she’s an ultrasound technician who got her degree in Muskogee? That’s what I meant. I suppose similar things occur in all places that feel themselves po-dunk, but that scene was written with a particular curl of the lip, I thought.

HB: again, I haven’t seen the movie, but your explanation is helpful and does make some sense.

The interview with Diablo Cody (perhaps the trashiest pseudonym ever) also did exemplify the self-disdain and trying too hard of the flyover-country kid made good.

Now I’m wondering about the Midwestern and Southern relations to the truth, but perhaps you can just explain that the next time I see you: it sounds tangled.

Okay, I’ve got a block of time here but between HB and Nate I feel like I’m trying to cover a lot of ground and I apologize if it comes off piece-meal.

First, I find myself being the I-see-what-you’re-saying-but-let’s-slow-down-a-minute guy in conversations a lot, so it’s pretty unusual to run across something that I can sit and ponder for a few minutes and still not be able to relate to at all, least of all in this crowd, but I think we might’ve found one: In art, bad is pain[… .]

I’m not sure what to say about that right away, but that the bellicose tones make a lot more sense now.

I think only very good art has ever caused something in me that I would call pain. For me, I think the most typical or defining descriptor of bad art is impotence. It most often means indifference or boredom; at times it can be a riot with friends, mostly in short doses, I guess, but that’s our doing and not the art’s. I suppose the content itself can be infuriating, but I would think that’s mostly political and not what you’re talking about. I do know that there’s an opportunity cost, since you could always spend that time, say, reading Tolstoy — and that cost does prevent me from reading a lot of low- or middle-brow novels. But I actually spend quite a bit more time not reading Tolstoy than some of my acquaintances might suspect, and I can afford a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon for a movie or something.

I can relate quite a bit to what HB said about mediocre or bad movies. I too didn’t finish Zoolander, but not because it hurt me. It just seemed dumb. I could maybe see certain parts of it being enjoyable surrounded by certain friends in high spirits, but it really wasn’t for me. I did see Superbad (for free, at a special screening in San Francisco) and thought it was hilarious for a few moments in the beginning, and touchingly pathetic and relate-able at a few parts, but I wouldn’t jump to see it again and probably wouldn’t recommend it to most people (I would to some; of course that’s situational).

Lest you think my sensitivity to art is somehow dulled (you did seem to be gesturing toward a kind of unusually heightened sensitivity for yourself), I assure you that I relate very well to your expressions of joy (even giddiness or ecstasy) at great and even very good movies. I recall feeling that your descriptions of seeing Little Miss Sunshine and Ratatouille, for instance, quite reflected my own. But the bad movies, they just leave me flat. Sometimes, if a person I know well enough suggests certain movies, I might groan or roll my eyes; and if I were a more hyperbolic guy I might make more show of it and call it pain, but it’s really not, at least for me, and I suppose that difference could manifest itself in some different thoughts about certain movies, even if our thoughts on the whole tend to coincide.

Is it a decision, on some level? To use your analysis of Anton Ego’s defense of snobbery, upon tasting something that one does not love, one must decide whether to swallow. There’s still no pain there, exactly — but I say it anyway because I didn’t love Juno, I merely liked it. I think I may sometimes be something of a snob myself, and I do often choose not to swallow (I don’t see terribly many movies, really, and what I do see is usually in the months prior to Oscar or from the archives). But I wonder if — to throw a bridge to another thread — we aren’t each deciding in some way how big our worlds will be. Mine has room in it for movies like Juno, and maybe that means there will be somewhat more shit in it, but also that the little incursions of shit don’t cause me pain. (Which is too inelegant a mess of metaphors, since I don’t mean to say that I thought Juno was shit, but maybe you get what I mean.)

And I’m sure you are right that many people simply miss a lot of the things you perceive in movies. A lot of people are illiterate ruffians. Vulgar masses, and all that. I hope you don’t think it unkind of me, though, to believe it markedly less likely that so many particular people are blind utterly to something so painfully obvious to you — especially when that thing is, as you say, shallowness, which is not usually a subtle thing that even perceptive people “simply miss.” More likely is that they perceive (rightly or wrongly) some kind of depth where you do not (some of them, at least, do seem overtaken by some of the movie’s more subjective charms), or that they admit its imperfections but make less stringent demands of it.

This has been an awkward discussion for me because I entered it to counter the chorus whose range seemed to span from “merely bad” to “evil and soul-destroying and everyone (including the entire range of the movie reviewing establishment muahahaha) is an idiot who didn’t already think so,” and so I’ve come to feel that I’m defending the movie’s considerable virtues, when in fact my own estimation was that it was cute and sweet and had some moments and aspects that impressed me.

I “scoffed at” (or whatever) the comparison to Woody Allen because I didn’t think this movie deserved such a comparison, but I guess I am a little suspicious of such comparisons right across the board. I suppose there may be some conversation where it is helpful to make some limited comparison of, say, Arthur Miller and Shakespeare (and I don’t mean to call Juno Arther Miller or Woody Allen Shakespeare), but more generally I think I find it somewhat distasteful and not really fair to either of them. It has for me a little of the taint of rankings and lists, which — though I do not deny the staggering grandeur of Lear and had a quick reflex to make the parenthetical disclaimer above — I think a particularly petty and fruitless endeavor. It tells me very little about The Great Gatsby to describe the ways it is inferior to The Brothers Karamazov. And at the end of it, Gatsby may still be worth my time. But anyway, the point of the comparison for HB seemed to be that Juno does not have real characters, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

Before that, though, I do want to say that I think I agree with your casting of the “expectation problem” of movies as a problem of mislabeling, whether the mistaken label is “cheerful romp” for a long, quiet piece about human nature or simply “profound” and “best movie of the year” for “cute and sweet with some affecting moments and impressive aspects.” One expects A and gets B, and, if the difference is great and one is not prepared for it, sees neither. I suppose that, “with better art,” as you say, this may become more complicated — it may defy genre-labels or its greatness may become obvious to you despite expectation, or whatever, but I don’t think this line of thinking is invalidated. You ask rhetorically what genre to assign Wes Anderson movies, or which one to mistakenly expect for them, but surely you know people (I know several) who saw Rushmore (or whichever) after hearing “best comedy in years” and found that they totally didn’t get it. And some who, seeing it again later, found that they got it. I think this is a particularly common reaction to Wes Anderson, actually. And this is perhaps all to suggest just how vast and complicated is the context in which we understand and appreciate art, and also how important.

Incidentally, I would be interested in reading whatever extended review you should write on Love Actually. Though I didn’t say its faults “are merely in its being saccharine.” I think it’s faults are many, and I called it saccharine and absurd; I just don’t think it’s, you know, soul-destroying, or anything to get worked up about. I will always be happy to hear you out, though. Just be wary of arguments that expose you to easy dismissal as a grinch who thinks the sky is falling.

And to a few of HB’s points:

Maybe our views on “religion and psychobabble and no-fault divorce these days” are putting an unbridgeable gap between our respective understandings of the Jason Bateman character, but I get the sense we’re not getting closer on him, and as the treatment of him and his wife were one of the more memorable (and, I thought, laudable) aspects of the movie, maybe that’s telling.

Again, I am working with an increasingly fuzzy memory of a movie I saw quite a few weeks ago, but I didn’t think it “just threw him out there” as though he were plastic. And I think he did understand the harm he was causing, and did not want to ignore it — but that he understood the harm as already having been caused, and he was regretful of that, and wanted to minimize further trauma. The effort to minimize further trauma, whatever you believe about its efficacy, was in fact explicit (I think they called it “cooperative” rather than “no-fault” divorce, which is perhaps a politico-religious but also an importantly lexical distinction). The line about the loft in the Twin Cities was not, I thought, the Voice of Truth, but was said contemptuously by his wife, and I thought it a decently-well written and a particularly well-acted revelation of her pain, and a revelation that was then subdued as she realized its hatefulness in this particular expression; and I thought it was met with tact and subtlety by her husband, who would presumably not agree with the sentiment but did understand that she (and perhaps we) would have it.

Was the character fit for a Woody Allen movie? Probably not. Certainly not a major character in one of his better movies. But so what?

And on this:
So, Juno’s a movie about a hipster realizing that suburban, or maybe just wedded, bliss doesn’t exist?

Well, no. Or yes and no. As an English teacher, and as a literate person who interacts with a lot of not-so-literate people, I hear formulations like “X is just a (book/poem/movie/thing) about y” a lot, and it’s deliberately reductive no matter how you fill in the blanks, and even though it’s easy to make it kind of true about literally anything you want, it’s almost always uninsightful and usually a way of obliterating further consideration.

I came across this article, “Loathe, Actually,” and thought of you, Nate! http://movies.msn.com/new-on-dvd/feature-article/?news=298765
It does some daft thing if you try to click the link to the second page of the article, so get to it this way: http://movies.msn.com/new-on-dvd/feature-article/?news=298766

It doesn’t actually include the film that its title is playing off of among the worst “romantic” movies though.

Speaking of virtuousness or virtuosity in movies, have you all seen No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood? (Or any of the other contenders?)

Let’s see: on the comparisons of things great, small, and mediocre. Of course it’s only marginally useful to compare Fitzgerald and Dostoevsky simply for ranking purposes or to answer the question, “who’s a better author?” But I at least said, “Hey, here’s something that a good movie should do. Woody Allen does it well—see what I mean?” I felt some concern when I introduced the comparison, I admit, since I know how things can appear, especially in print, especially in this context; and, indeed, the crux of our disagreement lies elsewhere. I hear your caution, and I wouldn’t want to do what you proscribe: I want to be open to the good things that can be said by the Fitzgeralds of the world. As I’ve said, I’m not sure it’s worth being open to many of the lesser voices, but I wouldn’t want to be unfair once I’ve seen them. Still I can’t shake the notion that, when judging art, it’s helpful to keep the old stand-bys and their excellence on hand, at very least as examples of certain elements of their craft. I’m just not sure how to judge art as good or bad otherwise.

On Bateman’s character. If our views on religion and psychobabble and divorce do diverge, that would provide a much more interesting and fruitful angle for this conversation than we currently have. I’m not sure how to enter into that topic, though. I don’t think we really get enough from him to know about whether he’s doing the right thing at the end, else I’d start there.

Look, I was pretty sympathetic with the guy when I watched the movie, even in his possible error. I can see how your descriptions are plausible—I liked the recounting of the exchange about the loft, and I can see how you’d find what you did in there. But I felt like there was a strong authorial voice even into the events at the end, one that really wanted to dress him down. I thought its lines were spoken by Juno and Vanessa in large part, something I felt was confirmed by the emphasis on the note in the last sequence; I can see how this might go the other way, though. (I hesitate to ask, but would be interested in hearing some female reactions to his treatment in the movie.) Maybe this scorn was appropriate (the voiced by the two characters, if not necessarily the author). One can see it as a counterpoint to Juno’s indy, rock-and-roll sensibilities—the warning of not growing up, or of thinking perhaps that you had, but without doing the real work of it. But I still felt he was used as a signpost, not given his due. That said, I’m sick of criticizing the movie and admit that I may have missed stuff at the end due to my earlier reactions of annoyance and boredom.

As to the reductionist sentence, I was responding to your answer here: For all the hipster derision of the suburban caricature, this is exactly what Juno wants for her child. She surely could have found some more “non-traditional” parents, but this set is perfect. The hipster mocks it, but paradoxically believes in its goodness, of its rightness for children, so much so that the great crisis you identify is precipitated by her realizing its fragility. I’ll take the criticism for speaking imprecisely, perhaps boorishly. I felt that your description of the character’s fractured desires was illuminating and I meant to be responding to it in summarized form, not to the exclusion of other meaning in the movie. If I had felt that 1) the movie wasn’t trying at that moment and others to set out a centralized lesson, instead of letting the complexity unfold entirely on its own, and 2) our access to the particularized pains and desires of Juno were less obstructed, I would have found it easier to restrain myself from such a summary. But, again, I’ll back off these types of criticisms for now, as I doubt my perceptions’ accuracy on these parts of the movie.

I’ve seen none of the other contenders.