WARNING: Plot Spoilers Ahead

At the risk of being murdered in my sleep, I'm going to write a review of the movie Juno. I haven't seen any movies lately that have really moved me, but I was so affected by this one that I feel I must speak. You may have heard some of the buzz about this movie especially around Oscar season(it got 4 nominations and won "Best screenwriting"); Oprah loved it, critics and audiences raved about it, the whole world seemed to be in love with Juno and the quirky, off-beat soundtrack. The synopsis on the DVD proclaims "Juno delivers huge laughs and feel-good fun without even trying!" First of all, it does try. Really hard. The result is a sometimes-funny but mostly-abstract dialect that seems just a little too contrived, especially since most of the characters in the movie seem to speak the same language. Whole towns don't talk like that, just Diablo Cody(the Academy award-winning writer). And she's funny, sometimes; mostly because she uses the word "shenanigans." It's a funny word, no embellishment required. In case you live under a rock, this movie is supposed to be a feel-good coming-of-age story about a girl named Juno who finds herself pregnant at the age of 16. After having second thoughts in the waiting room of an abortion clinic, Juno decides to give her baby up for adoption and finds the "perfect" couple; a would-be rock star husband still holding onto the glory days of his past and an uptight OCD wife who has neither tolerance nor respect for her husband and his guitar collection. Openly naive Juno admits that they look perfect on the outside, but quickly discovers that all couples have their problems. Juno's own mother left her when she was a baby to marry someone else, and Juno's father remarried a no-nonsense woman who continually refers to Juno as her "dumb-ass stepdaughter." I was thinking that this would be one of those movies about growing through life's struggles, owning your mistakes and rising to the challenge; it seemed like an obvious assumption given the accidental pregnancy-turned-adoption angle. One teenager's mistake is a barren woman's dream come true, surprise baby gets loving parents and everyone lives happily ever after. But no. The plot comes crashing down when Juno goes to visit the prospective parents of her baby and finds herself alone with the husband(Mark), with whom she has been exchanging music and almost-flirtatious conversation. While listening to a song Mark says reminds him of his prom, Juno and Mark start slow-dancing. A pregnant 16 year-old and a grown married man. It was at this point that Aaron announced, "I'm uncomfortable." My sentiments exactly. As they sway slowly back and forth together, Juno's head resting on Mark's chest, Mark says softly, "I'm leaving Vanessa." All of a sudden Juno is uncomfortable, not over the fact that the man she was hoping would be a father to her baby is coming onto her, but because he's leaving his neurotic and unaffectionate wife. I think I would have liked the movie if Mark and Vanessa really had been a loving couple dying for a baby, but the reality the film seems to be getting at is that everybody has problems and there's no such thing as a lasting marriage or a stable family so just do the best you can. Having been unwed and pregnant myself, I sympathize with Juno getting called a "dumb-ass" and receiving unwanted attention from the kids in school(though I think it was easier to be pregnant in college than it would have been in high school). To her credit, Juno doesn't let herself be defined by a moment of poor judgment and is frustrated by others' inability to see beyond her pregnant state. No one seems to be very upset about the fact that she had sex so much as the fact that she was dumb enough to get pregnant, a hypocrisy of our society I find infuriating. Having sex is fine, getting pregnant is what makes you an idiot. So after all that drama, Mark leaves his wife and Juno still gives her baby to Vanessa, a woman hungry for a baby but who demonstrates throughout the film her rigid inability to let people be who they are and insists they be who she wants them to be or get out of her life. Poor parent material, I think. But maybe I'm the crazy one for thinking that the point of parenthood is not to turn your children into who you want them to be, but to help them become who they want to be. And that's how the movie ends. No one really seems to experience any growth or change, and the message seems to be "find the best way to endure your problems until the storm passes so that you can go back to being the way you were before." And the soundtrack is absurd, accomplished mostly by two people who can't actually sing and can kind of play guitar. I can do neither, but I realize that and don't subject other people to performances of my "artistry" then defend my lack of talent by calling it "honest." Sure it's honestly; honestly bad. I sound like a huge prude and a major kill-joy, but I'm not really; I like movies that feature triumph over adversity and mistakes turning into opportunities for life-changing growth, but Juno isn't one of them.