Ellen Page earns nomination for U.K. rising star film award

(Oops, this shouldn't have been in the business category - blame it on my not havng posting news for months)

Anyway, I posted this for two reasons... the first being that she's from Halifax

Mostly though, I was wondering if people had seen Juno, and what they thought of it.

(I'll point out here that I'm going to discuss a lot of the film here, so stop reading if you haven't seen it)

I went to see it before Christmas, and had mixed feelings. On one hand, I thought the acting was pretty good, and felt Ellen made the film.

On the other, I thought the script felt a little too pretentious, and a bunch of the story didn't make a lot of sense. Maybe I'm just too used to strictly linear plotlines, but there seemed to be an awful lot of things that appeared significant to the story, yet in the end had no real effect on the conclusion.

Michael Cera's character didn't really have any real involvement in the whole thing - I went into the film thinking it was about those two (Bleeker and Juno) dealing with her pregnancy, yet he virtually disappears after the first few scenes, and then pops back in occassionally and at the end for no real reason. The scene at the end of them lying in the hospital bed together made no real sense to me, since he really wasn't with her through the whole affair.

What the hell was with the relationship with Jason Bateman's character?!? At first it seemed like they had a pretty cool father/daughter type thing, yet it turned into a creepy affair that I'm glad eventually petered out. That brings me to my last issue with the writing:

The splitting up of the adopting couple - another thing that seemed to add nothing to the story. They break up, Juno gets cold feet, you think she's going to keep it after all, and then just decides to give it to Jennifer Garner anyway... so what was the point?

Oh, and in regard to my 'pretentious' comment earlier - the whole things between Juno and Mark (Jason Bateman) with sharing their crap music and films went on way too long. I know film makers like to share their eclectic taste in other media to some extent, but this just felt like I was being force fed the writer's/director's/whoever's taste in crap music.

Anyway, my point is that there were all these little things that seemed to be leading somewhere significant, yet it all ended up working out for her (Juno) exactly as she'd planned. The whole time I was waiting for one of these events to actually do something to change her, but nothing really seemed to have any effect in the end.

I really wanted to like this one because the acting was pretty good and there were some good points, but it just seemed to be a little shallow for the type of film it was trying to be.

Anyway, this is probably the most I've ever critiqued a film, so I'm going to stop and see what other people thought.