Got a preview invitation for Juno from Fox Searchlight, and saw it in a packed theater last week.

Even before the movie started, Fox put off the audience by pushy/blatant marketing - Free T-Shirt is one thing (thanks!:), but they also gave a postcard which read like a SPAM we receive in our inboxes daily. "Win a XYZ prize!!!" sign-up for ‘Junoverse’ website, post reviews, blogs, videoblogs, invite friends,  design poster, Tshirt etc etc etc… for each activity u receive points (bleh) and see the movie many many times…. each time you get…. gasp…. more points! It seems they naturally assumed everyone will like this movie and make it a hit cult classic (like L.M.Sunshine) - thats in-your-face marketing. It would have been great if they gave it *after* the movie ended.

Coming back to the movie, it stars an oversmart irritating character Juno, who gets knocked-up and how she goes about dealing with it, is the story. Sort of like Knocked Up, sans all the wonderful characters and devoid of its humor . As a bonus, Juno has a major side-story arc of adoption, which goes nowhere except as planned.

The story, by itself, is a straight linear narration without any surprises - She plans to give away her kid, and she does - Thats it. The filmmakers had few chances to make the story much more interesting, but they chose to stick to the main thread, thereby making the payoff much boring for us. Two such instances:

- When the prospective adopting parent, Vanessa, who is childless and really really yearning for a child - is seen holding a kids hand in the mall while Juno accidentally sees her - I was intrigued by this sudden development - if Vanessa already has a child, why is she SO keen on adopting Juno’s kid. What kind of sinister plot is this going to be - how is Juno going to save her baby from schizophrenic Vanessa. But the filmmakers used that scene to show how much Vanessa loves kids. Yawn.

- When the adopting parent, Marc is dancing with Juno in his dark room where they were about to have a tender moment… he whispers to her that he is leaving Vanessa - join that with the next scene where Juno confesses to her dad that she has found her perfect lover - I thot ‘hmm… interesting… Marc is leaving Vanessa, and Juno is in love with him’ - K.Balachandar would have been so proud - but no, it went where it was supposed to go - Marc left Vanessa and disappeared from the movie, and Juno found her perfect lover in her old nerdy boyfriend (who reminded me of Napoleon Dynamite)

Acting-wise, Jennifer Garner as Vanessa was great - she appeared overacting, but that can be contributed for her overzealous desire to be a mother. The brat Juno McGaf was played by a great actress, Ellen Page, who earlier played an annoying, irritating teenager in Hard Candy - which was wonderful as the subject demanded it - she walked into this movie with the same annoying smart-cracking character, which didn’t suit the tone of this movie.

Junoooooo!!

Movie opens December 2007

2/5