Well, I'm a nail technician and I think we both ought to just stick to what we know.

[dr_kromm]

Remember how when I was blathering about Burn After Reading, I said that I don't generally go on about movies? Well, I'm about to do it twice in one month . . .

I'm slowly catching up with my backlog of 2007 and 2008 movies-to-see. Okay, to be honest, I know that I'll never actually catch up. They keep making new movies, I keep getting distracted, and I have a pile of DVDs that I haven't even watched yet. But I'm trying!

Tonight I finally watched Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007). It is possibly the best movie I've seen in 2009. It butts right onto my Top 20 list, and maybe my Top 10. This isn't because of its story, really, or its dialog – not that those were in any way bad – but because it's possibly the best-cast movie I've ever seen, and every single cast member does incredible things with her or his part. If you like movies that are 99% about the quirky characters walking around being quirky, but you don't like them to be so quirky that they're unbelievable, then you might want to check out this movie.

Other random things that amuse me about this film:

• Ellen Page is from my home town, and where I lived for the first 23 years of my life: Halifax, Nova Scotia. How cool is that?

• Juno and Burn After Reading, in addition to being the only two movies to get me blabbing in this blog since I started it, share an actor: J.K. Simmons. I was indifferent to him as J. Jonah Jameson, but his roles in both of these films were memorable.

• The soundtrack pretty much owns.

Comments

[mhacdebhandia.livejournal.com]

Intriguingly enough, Sean K. Reynolds (formerly of TSR/Wizards of the Coast fame, now of Paizo Publishing fame) once told a story about J. K. Simmons that boiled down to: he and his wife are jerks who let their kids run wild on public transport.

[wombattery.livejournal.com]

I should probably see that at some point, if for no other reason than a good friend of mine got an award from George Lucas for a Star Wars fan film which parodied the Juno trailer.

[morningapproach.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed Juno myself. A lot of friends I have who are movie buffs hated it and dissed on it, but I enjoyed it.

[dr-kromm.livejournal.com]

Certain people hate on this movie because it deliberately sets out to be "cool," "indie-styled," and "quirky." Had it failed to live up to its own hype, then these people would have had a valid reason to dislike the movie. However, the film succeeded admirably, so the hating sounds like sour grapes.

Then there are the critics who automatically hate any film that sets out to claim for itself any label that they feel only critics have the right to award, even if it successfully makes its claim. Those people are just fatheads. A filmmaker puts in more time and money during a day of shooting than a critic puts in reviewing everything he'll review that week. To my thinking, that gives the fimmaker every right to style her or his own film "cool" or "quirky." The label might not stick, and then the critics can fairly slag it . . . but if it does stick, well, the critics should just accept that the filmmaker is that good.

[vinzclorthodom.livejournal.com]

I waited quite a bit before seeing this movie, because I couldn't say the premise was very interesting to me. But I finally did saw it, and to my surprise, liked it quite a lot, enough to buy it on Blue Ray for $20 bucks.

I actually like J.K. Simmons a lot, since his role of a Nazi supremacist in Oz, but I think that's the first time he has been casted as a nice guy (maybe JJJ was not evil per se, but he was not really nice either). He is definitely getting into my cool, not-A actor list, with the likes of Alan Rickman, Michael Wincott, Ralph Fiennes and others.

[dr-kromm.livejournal.com]

He is definitely getting into my cool, not-A actor list, with the likes of Alan Rickman, Michael Wincott, Ralph Fiennes and others.

To be fair, Fiennes and Rickman have definitely crossed over onto the "A list." They just aren't lead protagonists of choice for big-budget summer action movies and romantic comedies. They're definitely in Malkovich or Spacey territory nowadays, though.

Wincott ought to get more roles. He basically made several movies enjoyable for me, notably Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, The Three Musketeers (1993), The Crow, Strange Days, Alien: Resurrection, and The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), although I also remember his bits in Romeo Is Bleeding and Seraphim Falls fondly. His character in 1492 always struck me as a perfect RPG villain!