Juno. Have you seen it? A movie, directed by Jason Reitman, about a sixteen year old who gets pregnant by her high school boyfriend, the nice kid, and puts the baby up for adoption but falls in love with the adoptive dad (Jason Bateman??!!) is the stuff that the old ABC After School Specials used to be made of. It goes to show you, it's not the what that makes a great movie, it's the how.
Juno should be seen by every junior high and high school student as a kind of cautionary tale about how to be authentic. It's less John Hughs's Breakfast Club and more in the vibrant dialogue flavor of Michael Lehman's Heathers because it will spawn other pretenders that won't be nearly as good. Yet, Juno is different than Lehman's movie because it goes against type. It's a wise-talking and rather normal character-driven movie that seems to be popular during this epoch, kind of like Dan in Real Life and other recent flicks where the central characters are borderline depressed people who find it hard finding love or even loving themselves, while all the while the audience is rabbit-eyes over them.
A clip from Jason Reitman's Juno
