Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007)

[Napoleon]

Inappropriate descent in to childish name-calling

Yet it is perfectly reasonable for rs98762001 poster to shit on Dylan's opinion?

[Michael Kerpan]

Inappropriate descent in to childish name-calling

Yet it is perfectly reasonable for said poster to shit on Dylan's opinion?

HE attacked the film. YOU attacked the poster.

See the difference?

And you conveniently ignore the fact that your ad hominem attack was, in fact, untrue.

[Michael Kerpan]

Right, except he particularly singled out one line of Dylan's praise, and then with all the eloquence he could muster, offered a pithy, and childish, one line rebuttal.

You don't have to like the film, but take one line from someone's post who obviously likes the film, and effectively shit on it, is not criticism.

Dylan has a perfect right to like the film. Others have a right to dislike it. However, suggesting that criticism of the film amounts to "desecration" is a bit of rhetorical over-kill that practically begs for a snappish response.

I think both sides of this debate tend to go pretty far overboard -- but direct (untruthful) personal attacks go one step beyond the normal, partially-uncivilized parameters of this discussion.

[domino harvey]

Dude, you are overreacting to an embarrassing degree

[Antoine Doinel]

Chill out, homeskillets.

[domino harvey]

Luckily this is one doodle that can be undid:

[Michael Kerpan]

Luckily this is one doodle that can be undid:

I clicked on your button and nothing happened!

;~}

MEK

[domino harvey]

Zee goggles-- they do nothing!

[rs98762001]

I like plenty of films. Just not terrible ones. And I gave a more reasoned critique of Juno much earlier in this thread. I saw the film months before it came out and even then, before much of the "hype," it was obvious how desperately in love with itself it was, and how desperately it wanted to be loved by others. Clearly many, including the bastion of good taste that is the Academy, fell for it.

[Dylan]

For the record, rs98762001 and I have been with this board for years and I don't give a shit if we disagree on Juno or Fellini or anything. Why would I?

[rs98762001]

Word.

[Michael Kerpan]

http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/7220 ... nimki3.gif
Zee goggles-- they do mothing!

What IS that green stuff?

[kieslowski]

It's sulphuric acid

[Michael Kerpan]

It's sulphuric acid

I see.

;~}

[Mr Sausage]

It took longer to come to this than I thought. So here's my obligatory plea for everyone to get back to the topic/their senses, and for the almost-trolling, one-liner abuse posts (which are against the forum's little read and little enforced rules) to stop. Or, I don't know, I'll have fun abusing my board-universal edit function.

[portnoy]

Thank you. If anything, I've seen far too little criticism of this movie in this thread. To bring up another of the film's crimes, can we briefly address how racist the character of the 'Engrish'-speaking Asian girl outside the abortion clinic is?

"HA! She's a chink! She can't speak English right! A-hyuk!" If that had been a black or Hispanic character ignobly tripping over subject-verb agreements, we'd recognize it for the hateful portrayal it is.

Or maybe we'd all say, "You know, some people don't speak English as well as other people. Oh well" and stop being offended by everything.

The film plays its humor off the otherness of the Asian character - her naivete, her inability to speak grammatically or idiomatically 'proper' English - she's every stereotype of a square, conservative FOB Asian American, and she's (I believe) the only non-white person in the entire movie. I'm not the type to try to find things to be offended about, but every choice has an imperative behind it, conscious or not. The choice here to utilize stereotype as a means of essentializing a minor character seems well within the problematic ethnic representations found in many recent comedies of quirk - Jared Hess's well-documented problematic relationship with Latinos, the Wes Anderson films and their use of Asian characters. Dismissing my concern for how this film addresses its only non-Caucasian character as some sort of oversensitivity seems like an unwillingness to acknowledge that there remain tremendous problems in representation in modern American cinema.

As I implied, if the character were some young black person speaking in some sort of minstrely 'jive' inflection or a young Latino talking like the Taco Bell Chihuahua, we'd be up in arms. Asian American characters speaking in a pidgin that would make Mickey Rooney blush, on the other hand, appear to be fair game.

[Antoine Doinel]

The Wes Anderson films and their use of Asian characters.

I agree with about the Asian character in Juno - it bordered on Mickey Rooney like abrasiveness. But I would like to hear more about your take on Wes Anderson. In Rushmore, Margaret Yang is a fairly strong character; in the Royal Tenenbaums I don't believe there are any Asian characters and as for The Life Aquatic the pirates are Asian because in that part of the world, well, the pirates are Asian.

[Marcel Gioberti]

Dismissing my concern for how this film addresses its only non-Caucasian character as some sort of oversensitivity seems like an unwillingness to acknowledge that there remain tremendous problems in representation in modern American cinema.

I think you're exactly right. Hollywood is best, however, at representing the normative. For whiteness and gender studies, in particular, mainstream American films are endlessly informative. To that end, posters around here echoing or at least defending the sentiments of Diablo Cody et al surprises me not at all.

[portnoy]

The Wes Anderson films and their use of Asian characters.

I agree with about the Asian character in Juno - it bordered on Mickey Rooney like abrasiveness. But I would like to hear more about your take on Wes Anderson. In Rushmore, Margaret Yang is a fairly strong character; in the Royal Tenenbaums I don't believe there are any Asian characters and as for The Life Aquatic the pirates are Asian because in that part of the world, well, the pirates are Asian.

For one thing, there is absolutely a prominent Asian character in The Royal Tenenbaums - Pagoda (Kumar Pallana).

To be honest, I use Anderson as an example largely because others have - I find his use of Asian characters less problematic than I do Juno's use of Su-Chin. I think the argument can be made that Anderson's consciously multiracial cast in Life Aquatic gives kind of a window-dressing treatment to the characters of non-Anglo ethnicities (Waris Ahluwalia, Niels Koizumi, Seu Jorge) - without any sort of developed personalities, they at times feel like art direction used to prop up the uniformly white characters at the film's center. Darjeeling upset me in a few ways, not least because I thought the film had something for it - it seemed to be about, at least in part, the callousness of cultural tourism in the east until it kinda jumps in whole-hog to embrace some 'beauty/exoticness of Indian culture' stuff in its second half.

[Mr Sausage]

Out of curiosity, do many of you have a lot of contact with Asian immigrants? Where I live they are probably the largest minority group, and while it has been a few weeks since I saw Juno, I don't recall anything about the Asian character's vocal mannerisms that seemed unnatural (the character did have a quirky delivery, but there was nothing particularly asian nor stereotypical about that, and it is probably the actress' actual voice). In fact her accent was less thick than a number of Asian students I have talked to this year.

Now, whether or not those unaffected mannerisms were still meant to be one more trait on top of several others meant for ridicule, I don't know. I doubt it, as I do the idea that the Asian character is meant to represent 'otherness' considering how 'other' Juno herself is (her representation of her earlier drug-induced nude spree in a fountain is far weirder than anything the other character says or does), but I am more indifferent than I am positive on this.

[portnoy]

As a point of fact, I work for a television network that specifically addresses Asian Americans, so I communicate with Asian immigrants on a daily basis. There is a large concern among a lot of Asian Americans with questions of representation and specifically the idea of Asian Americans as being unable to linguistically assimilate. Perhaps it's the actress's performance that makes the treatment of the character so problematic for me - the (not very good) actress appears to have a flat middle-American accent, her only linguistic marking of 'Asianness' being her inability to speak grammatically. The dialogue, in fact, seems to be written in such a way to emphasize the comic nature of her grammatical mistakes ("All babies want to get borned! All babies want to get borned!"). This makes it seem to me like the film is treating her being Asian as another quirky affectation, not unlike Paulie's love of orange tic-tacs or Juno's hamburger phone.

(Keep in mind it's been nearly five months since I've seen this film, so if my details are hazy, please forgive...)

[rs98762001]

This may be drifting into a different debate, but I was also a little confused by Anderson's treatment of India and Indians in DARJEELING. He seems to have always had a bit of a fascination with the country (or perhaps merely with Kumar), but I couldn't tell whether the fact that the three brothers seem so isolated from and disinterested in India during their travels was a sly comment upon typical American behavior overseas, or whether it simply reflected Anderson's own insularity. At first, I felt it was the latter, but then the solemnity of the scenes concerning the village boy's funeral (and specifically the villagers asking the brothers to stay for it) seemed to suggest otherwise.

Yet the death of the boy doesn't end up having any further effect upon the story or the characters and, ultimately, the movie could have taken place anywhere; India itself was merely a backdrop, a device through which the American brothers could be brought back together. It's an unfair comparison, but Renoir integrated the country into his story far more organically in THE RIVER.

Despite this, Anderson's depiction of the Eastern characters in his movies is at least well-intentioned (if perhaps misguided) and he's not merely seeking laughter at their expense, a la the example cited in JUNO. But then again, his worldview, while having shown itself to be limited over the course of his career to date, is still far more sophisticated and intelligent than that of Cody or Reitman. In fact, I feel bad that Wes' name seems to crop up so much in any Juno-related discussion. They have nothing in common.

[Matt]

The actress in question was born and raised in Vancouver and the pidgin English is in the script. The character is described as "a teenager of Asian descent" who speaks in an "extremely shy, accented voice." As is typical of the inconsistency of the script, the character's dialogue has no grammatical problems after the "All babies want to get borned!" line.

Since one only knows that the movie takes place in Minnesota thanks to the occasional mention by this or that character that they live in Minnesota and not through any actual regional specificity, I would not expect the movie to reflect the true ethnic makeup of the state's residents (there would need to be a lot more Nordic blondes, and at least one Hmong, Somali, or Mexican character), but I do think it's pretty appalling that Cody would write the one ethnic character in the film as a stereotype. Thank heaven for small favors, I guess: at least she wasn't working on math problems and practicing her violin while protesting the clinic.

[domino harvey]

This isn't James Caan in El Dorado, and "babies want to be borned" is considerably funnier than collecting bones in pants

[portnoy]

I didn't laugh, but then, I didn't laugh during much of the movie, so maybe I'm just a humorless prig.