Quickies: Juno and the Blood

Juno (2007). Directed by Jason Reitman; Screenplay by Diablo Cody; Starring Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney. -- Juno may feel like a great movie, if only because it's storyline is certainly sophisticated with the shifts opportunely timed, and it concerns themes of greater immediacy to our own experiences (rather than, e.g., the soul-sucking megalomania of rich oilmen). That said, the dialogue is woefully second-rate, unworthy even of The Gilmore Girls, and very irritating in the first 30 minutes or so. Turns well for the better in the second half, the moment the characters start thinking smart and stop speaking smart (save for Jennifer Garner's Vanessa, whom Ms. Cody evidently considers too boring to deserve even just a sip of that trademark "sparkling wit"). But really, the whole enterprise is woefully overrated. Ellen Page, in a star-making turn as the sassy but not yet as savvy Juno, is fine but does not hold up a candle to Caroline Dhavernas in the criminally neglected Wonderfalls. Rest of the cast is apt, though it was 'haps more than one way too cute to cast Jason Bateman and Michael Cera - father and son in Arrested Development - as Juno's two persons-of-interest.

There Will Be Blood (2007). Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano. -- Especially in his dotage, Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview somewhat channels Michael Palin's land-hungry King of Swamp Castle ("One day, lad, all this will be yours!") Get past that or whatever reminiscences you can draw from Mr. Day-Lewis's slightly over-mannered shtick, and you have an unambiguously great movie, certainly leagues better than any Oscar Best Picture winner of this century (or at least since Schindler's List, and a case could be made up until The Godfather, Part II). It feels too short at over 2 hours, 40 minutes, and it has the best non-hummable musical score I have ever heard (by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood). What I find especially admirable is how it only pinches at the surface of all its big themes (i.e., capitalism, religion) so as not to be coerced into asserting the hoary big-picture symbolisms (greed equals capitalism, etc.) that inflate many a less-judicious epic. Instead, there is breathing room to appreciate the more human aspects of the story, as well as the overall ambiguities in the larger themes. I never thought they'd ever make another movie similar to Dovzhenko's Earth (1930), but here it is, minus the naive Marxism.