It mainly just made me want to watch Arrested Development.
Yesterday I met up with Katie early cuz for some reason both of us were up before 10. We went to Marylebone High Street and walked around a bit, had a coffee, farcically bumped our heads against windows gazing after attractive workmen (ok, just Katie), had delicious lunch at Eat and 2 Veg, went into several bookstores, ducked into several other shops to warm up on their heaters before braving the below freezing outdoors, walked to Oxford Street and attempted to do some shopping at H&M, went over to Shaftesbury so Katie could do some of her wifely duties by exchanging some theatre tickets that were a gift for Jamie's aunt, got tickets to Juno, did more book shopping, saw Juno, wandered PACKED Covent Garden area for food and found the last table at some Italian restaurant, ate, went to our favourite pub The Cross Keys, went to The Coal Hole on the Strand, and ultimately went our separate ways, me on the bus, Katie in her posh black cab. WHEW. And to think, we were also gonna throw in boating in Regents Park, but decided we were already freezing and going out on a boat wouldn't make things any warmer.
Now, Juno. I'm sure my irritation does have to do with the fact that I saw it AFTER all this ridiculous hype has been built up and I've read all these articles about it, but I can't do anything about that, can I? If it was really the brilliant amazing hilarious unique perfect movie everyone says it is, it would've lived up to all that expectation, like I think Atonement does. First of all, I think that much-praised script was absurd. Trying too hard, wannabe hipster, one-liner spewing, desperate to be the new Napoleon Dynamite. How can you be so praised for a script, how can you be heralded as the best new thing in screenwriting, when you can't adequately create ONE fully-realized character? If she had taken one minute to actually put some emotion or realness into any of the lines instead of trying to force-feed catchphrases the whole damn time, it might've worked a bit better. I liked the moment where the dad said "I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when" and you can see how painfully that registers and Juno says "I don't really know what kind of girl I am." That was good; that was recognizable human emotion and speech patterns. But the rest of the time it was all "Your eggo is preggo, homeskillet", "I am fo'shizz up the spout", and "honest to blog?" HONEST TO FUCKING BLOG?! To quote the ever-more-obviously-inimitable Steve Merchant, "That's just words!!!" And half the time it wasn't even original. To say that someone's house smells like soup?? Done. The ONLY reason I accepted it at all was cuz Michael Cera is absolutely brilliant and can deliver anything amazingly (more on him in a moment). All the things that would be 'exponentially cooler' than going to prom with Bleeker? Nothing remotely comically unique. And of course it ends with an extended monologue on what love is and how we have to realize it when we have it. Yawn. Amature, that's all. Verbalizing what little emotion your characters have and the ultimate scripting sin: uninspired voiceover.
Abortion clinic girl: Name?
Juno: Juno McGuff.
Voiceover: She thinks I'm using a fake name.
THANK GOD she spelled THAT out, I wouldn't have been able to understand that through the facial expressions of the actors. Give this woman an Oscar already!! I read the best thing somewhere online earlier: "She continues to another non-sequitur where the character talks like Diablo Cody writes." Right?
And I didn't think Ellen Page was that good. If anything, she was the weak link in a way more talented supporting cast, and that INCLUDES Jennifer Garner, so... ouch. I think it all spawns from the overrated non-script script with no characterization or emotion or naturalness, but I guess everyone else was able to work with their supremely underwritten parts and she wasn't. Everything she said sounded unnatural and irritating and I hoped that might ultimately be revealed to be a sort of hard front to a more insecure core, but no, just kept at it with the snark and pop culture references. She had no depth or range; it was all one irritating, ultra-wannabe-hip note. I like sarcasm, I like snarkiness, and I HATED the character of Juno.
But I loved Michael Cera! My god, he had like nothing to do and everything he did I was gonna cry cuz it was so awkward and wounded. It was such a contrast with Juno's totally unreal, almost absurdist caricature of a character and then Michael Cera being TOTALLY naturalistic and REAL. Like seriously, this movie should've been about him. And also Jason Bateman, cuz everything he does is magical too. I liked that he was sort of a dick, cuz it was something different. Katie and I both totally GASPED when he was turning into a bit of a sketchball and dancing with Juno and said he was leaving Jennifer Garner, but I really liked when he just went with it and was like "I'm leaving." Yeah, he can pretty much do no wrong. Jennifer Garner was very touching, again, with very little to work with. Allison Janney is amazing in everything but made me wish I was watching her in something better, like Drop Dead Gorgeous (Yeah, 'most smartest'). J.K. Simmons was good too. Yeah, pretty much everyone but Ellen Page and Rainn Wilson I was a fan of, because they sometimes managed to overcome serious deficiencies in the script.
I also think it's the most ridiculous, stomach-turning piece of bullshit that Jason Rietman's bland, uninspired direction is nominated for an Oscar and Joe Wright, freaking JOE WRIGHT, is snubbed. Could ANYONE ELSE have directed Juno and no one would have known the difference? Yes. Could ANYONE ELSE have directed Atonement and no one would have known the difference? In the spirit of better Bateman/Cera projects: COME ON!
When I got home Junebug was on telly, so as I hadn't seen it, I stayed up to watch. There's an example of a character that transcends a very basic, done-before plotline. Amy Adams was SO freaking cute! There wasn't enough Alessandro Nivola, so I don't know what was up with that. Good movie though.
Today I could've just stayed in bed all day if I could've gotten my brain to shut up. I decided to go take a walk somewhere and get a coffee. I was so sick of walking down Finchley Road so I decided to take the bus into the city and go from there. For some reason I was feeling like going to Trafalgar Square, so I took the bus to Oxford Street and got out there. I could've taken the bus to the end of the world, I was just spacing but I felt like I was doing something and not just sitting around, even though I was sitting. But I did basically ride from one end of the the line to the other, so I suppose I should've gotten a National Express bus to Glasgow if I wanted a long bus ride. Anyway, walked across Piccadilly to Trafalgar Square, where I stumbled upon the Kosovo declaration of independence celebrations. I had no clue what was going on at first, cuz as I was getting to the square a bunch of cars drove by honking and waving red flags and I didn't know what they were about. Then there were about a million and two people all with the same red flags and tshirts and everything just sort of milling around taking pictures around the National Portrait Gallery. Eventually I saw a girl with a jacket that said "A state of our own" on the back and my very limited knowledge of world affairs put that together with the scarves saying "Kosova" that I'd seen and got me to the logical endpoint. All day people were driving around the square honking. I mean seriously all day, it was mental.
Eventually I left the celebrations and went to get a coffee in Borders. Browsed there for awhile, going through random quizzes in this massive British quiz book. Turns out I actually know quite a lot of random shit. I didn't get anything there (I walked around for quite awhile with the original House on Haunted Hill for 2.99 but didn't get it in the end), but did pop into Blackwells next door and take a good long while browsing their clearance section. If you have the patience for it, boxes of clearance books are lovely. You have to wade through all sorts of like meaningless sporting annuals and computer programing guides and quite a lot of bizarre but somehow uninteresting medical stuff, but sometimes you can find something that suits your weird taste and it's lovely to get it for only 1 or 2 pounds. I got Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which I'd been wanting but not enough to pay full price; A Shape of My Own, a memoir about anorexia cuz I'm sort of fascinated by eating disorders at the moment (possibly, like many things, the fault of watching too much Hollyoaks); and a brand new, still shrink-wrapped The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of the 1990s. Originally, those books would've cost 33 quid altogether. In the bargain bin, I got them all for a fiver. Granted, you have to be a weirdo who likes eating disorders and humanitarian crises and things with 'murder' and 'morgue' (or both) in the title, but still, the bargain bin is where it's at. 'Likes' may not be the right word there, but you know what I mean.
From there I wandered back through Covent Garden and down Bow Street, stopping to talk to a likely homeless man for a minute. Once I got to the bus stop on the Strand I had to wait awhile cuz of the massive ass traffic jam being caused by the Kosovo festivities going on down the road; this girl was being chatted up by a guy who I initially thought was a friend of hers cuz he was being so all up in her space, so I quickly put on my ipod to avoid being bothered. Being bothered at the bus stop is the worst, cuz there's not too much delicate escape. Eventually the bus did come and I took a seat in what I thought would be the quiet back of the upper deck, but one stop up a group of people got on and broke ALL the rules of the bus. Two of them were BLARING music possibly just from a boombox, not even an ipod, several were having excessively loud conversations on their phones. If I hadn't have put on my soothing music really really loud in an attempt to drown it all out, my brain might have started bleeding. There was just so much grating noise.
I got home and ate some random dinner, watched Dancing on Ice and Wife Swap and now have Kingdom of Heaven on in the background. It isn't very good, is it. Poor Orli. Anyway, I might start a new book.
In other news, I'm sort of on the verge of puking at every moment. I'm fairly sure that when the phone rings tomorrow I will actually vomit. So I'll keep you posted on that. Ta.