First Jason Reitman comes up with a cute, funny and wrong apology of the tobacco industry called Thank You For Smoking and gets away with it. This feat is followed by a cute, funny movie about teenage pregnancy called Juno. The movie wins an Oscar and makes over $100M in the box office. What next Jason? A cute and funny movie about the Iraq war?
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Thank You For Smoking and Juno because the acting was excellent and both scripts were fantastic. My problem, and that of millions of parents of teenagers (my three older kids are 13, 15 and 17) is that not only I had to give my kids the "but smoking is still bad" talk after watching Thank You For Smoking but I had to give them a tougher "don't try this at home" talk after Juno's charm had invaded our home. The issue of unprotected sex, abortion and adoption is a complicated one in every country and I could not accept Juno as a role model for my kids (this tiny post in my Spanish blog with 81 comments shows how thorny the subject is).
Two moral stands later, still struggling with the incorrect moral undertone of Jason´s films I would argue that I prefer movies that are easier to deal with as a parent. Films like Knocked Up for example in which people who do wrong things (mixing drugs and unprotected sex) truly look the part. What's so effective and yet so hard to morally deal with as a parent is that Jason Reitman's characters are so damn effective! Jason Reitman specializes in portraying appealing characters who unfortunately also do very wrong things like lobbying for tobacco companies and getting pregnant after a night of casual sex at 16. In Thank You for Smoking and Juno, Jason Reitman went way pass his father as a movie director of social subjects (dad did Kindergarden Cop) into a new political arena, one that is valid but thorny, namely that of showing people we like who do things that we don´t believe in. By now I think Jason is developing his own genre of political movies: how to make the public fall in love with what they (mostly) think it´s wrong. Recently another movie who was neither cute, nor funny but probably better than Jason Reitman's films had the same effect on me and that is the German film The Life of Others. The Life of Others, a must see, is the story of a "good" torture expert... if you can believe that such person can exist or be redeemed. And yet it´s effective because in the world of grown ups we do learn to see that most bad people have something good in them and viceversa. But in the age of black and white sometimes...black and white is good at least if you are watching the movie with your kids and feel obliged to say something. But considering that Jason Reitman is not a teacher, nor a preacher but a movie director who likes to reverse engineer our morals I have a recommendation to make to him. I think his next feature should be about Diablo Cody the Oscar winner script writer of Juno. I am ready to watch the cute and funny version of the story of how stripping can help finance a writing career that leads to an Oscar. Well maybe this is not Jason Reitman's fault after all and maybe I just have a tougher job to teach my kids that life is as Facebook says "complicated".
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Well, at any rate, it's "The LIVES of Others."
Herdmanity--endlessly lost.
The character Juno makes her CHOICES all on her own. First, not to use protection for an experiment on having sex for the first time. It is not a romantic overwhelming moment but a sort of "let's rub two sticks together and see if it lights a fire in me". It does. When she deliberates about whether to take the pregnancy to term (Gosh, it has fingernails!), she makes another CHOICE, to have the child but give it up for adoption realizing that at 16 she is not prepared to support and raise a child.
She does not consult her impregnator (it's her body!), nor her parents (it's her CHOICE!) and goes about finding appropriate adopters for the result of a 30 week job/ordeal. She CHOOSES a couple who seem appropriate , and when they don't seem quite so appropriate, she CHOOSES again!
What i found so refreshing about the character is that she has no shame. Juno is not a "fallen woman, a disgrace". She has had a biological accident and behaved responsibly in cleaning it up. She continues to go to school; 50 years ago she would have been denied that opportunity. Her parents are models of FORGIVENESS and ACCEPTANCE. There's none of that MAUDLIN SENTIMENTALITY that a child is property and therefore must be possessed by its family of origin, even if that ownership is inappropriate for the child and the family. I find the film empowering in every way, especially in promoting INDEPENDENT SPIRIT. The awards? A good result!
Simply, Simon
The reason Juno became pregnant is the Abstinence Only programs in her school promoted by other like minded conservatives like yourselves in public school.
Teens are going to have sex no matter what. It's what they do. Even your kids. At a minimum they should be armed with the knowledge to prevent unwanted pregnancies and diseases.
If you think they aren't you are as dumb as you sound.
I agree, the movie portrays her as a reasonably stupid 16 year old who only received sex education from a school who believed in Abstinence Only. There is no way that a 16 year old that conducted herself so level-headed after the pregnancy knew anything about sex education exept what her evil-conservative school district allowed her to learn.