On an unrelated note

Huh. I’m pretty sure silicon sex toys aren’t toxic.

Reply

i dunno, it seemed kinda bitchy to me. “blah blah blah, i won an oscar, so all you critics can shove it. how dare you criticize my movie, it won an oscar, yours didnt. so nyah nyah nyah on you guys. because i was a stripper and you werent.”

my two questions: what the hell is a “zeitgeisty-demo-lifestyle pod”? i mean, what kind of psychobabble bullshit is that? its like the john mayer song “your body is a wonderland.” great to read/hear, but you try saying that in real life and you get laughed at.

and how the hell can anyone claim to be the “Mark Twain of extemporaneous jerk-off fiction” with a straight face. gee, it sure is hard to get a guy who called a phone sex line to orgasm. quick, give it to cody, she once wrote a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Ass, she can give him the jun-oh face!

then again, i didnt like Juno as much as everyone else. however, i dont go into froths of rage whenever i hear her name.

steps off soapbox, deposits two cents in jar.

Reply

*Shrugs*

I can definitely understand why she’s doing this; she has received a lot of vitriol that she hasn’t earned. I mean, I have issues with Juno, but they’re more around the hype than the actual film. The dialogue and the soundtrack kinda killed it for me, and I’ll never watch it again; but it actually did have a surprisingly strong emotional core.

I mean, yeah, this article sounds a little bitchy. And, yeah, the stripper/phone sex references are kinda weird. But that’s who she is. She’s got the right to brag, about her past and present; even if Juno didn’t speak to everybody, she made a movie that appealed to a lot of people that wasn’t a complete* rehash of what came before.

*”complete” being taken literally…

Reply

… okay, who is this person?

(Really, I had to get to the ’30 year old woman’ line to learn her gender. My lawn, get off it.)

Reply

It really bothers me when people complain that the dialogue in Juno is “inauthentic,” because it tells me that people weren’t paying close enough attention to the movie. Juno’s dialogue is inauthentic because Juno is an inauthentic person. She distances herself from serious interpersonal relationships because her mother abandoned her, so she tries real hard to keep everyone else at a distance. Speaking the way she does is one way to do that. The only people in the film who talk that way are Juno, her best friend, and the store clerk who’s only in the movie for like one minute, so who cares what he sounds like. The whole point of Juno is that Juno learns that there are some experiences that she can’t bluff her way through (childbirth) and that some relationships are worth the risk of getting hurt (Bleaker).

I liked Juno, really liked it, but I will say that the script is really only the third best thing about the movie. The cinematography and acting are what really sold me the picture.

Reply

And yet, no one talks about whoever wrote the screenplay for Epic Movie or Meet The Spartans. Surely, they are more deserving of hate speech from movie fans, right?

Reply

Honestly, I still haven’t seen Juno because of the hype surrounding it and the writer.

Also, because of its distinctly white hipster point of view and distinctly white hipster post-sarcastic dialogue. They think they’re funny, but they’re not. Regular sarcasm isn’t good enough for you?? It just seemed very… smug.

Also, while Cody did win a lot of awards that may or may not have been really deserved, the hype surrounding her is solely because of her stripper/phonesex past and because she is a woman. She’s like a snarkier version of what everyone implies Sarah Palin to be, and is loved for it (which doesn’t bode well for this election).

Reply

“Fake-independent film really helps critics establish street-cred.”

Dissing a fake-independent film really helps internet commenters establish street-cred.

“If she REALLY couldn’t be bothered about the ‘haters’, she would have written a bloody screenplay about it and wouldn’t have made that post.”

But “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” has already been made.

“One would think that the Oscar on the mantle would be validation enough to prevent semi-random rants on a MySpace blog.”

If awards soothed the nerves, we wouldn’t have nearly as many insane famous people.

Reply

I love the way all the Cody haters who pop up immediately dive into the kind of resentful whining that proves what she’s saying.

Some guy:
“how dare you criticize my movie”
Nowhere is this said, or anything even remotely equivalent.

Will E.:
“Probably because a lot of people think she’s received a lot of praise/awards she hasn’t earned, to which I’d wager the amount of vitriol is directly proportional.”
No, not even close to proportional. Wildly, dementedly, over the top overreaction, out of all proportion to the importance (which is _miniscule_) of the whole issue, period.
I have yet to see Juno, but it’s just a plain fact that if your reaction to something being overrated that you think isn’t “all that” (as the kids say) is to fly into a rage, there is something wrong with you.

Reply

All I know is from the commercials, which sucked, and did not entice me to go to the cinema, rent the DVD, or buy it. The movie could be pure untapped genius. But I don’t know, and I’m not going to buy it to find out, and I’m not the one with the DVD rental program.

That’s not being a hater. It’s not giving a shit.

Reply

@Jack Norris (Ed): To be quite honest, Jack, if I’m misinformed about the proportion of vitriol to praise, it’s mainly because I haven’t followed the whole thing even a little bit, which is why I argue the implication that I’m engaging in ‘resentful whining.’

To be blunt: I couldn’t care less of a shit about Juno. I’ll probably never watch it; so far as I’m concerned, the only thing that actually interests me about it, in any way, is that Jennifer Garner is in it, and I like her dimples. She was cool in 13 Going on 30. Besides Garner, though, it’s just not the sort of movie I’m generally much interested in; I’d rather watch Transformers again, personally.

I think, perhaps, you might read my intention more accurately if I reverse the clauses there: “A lot of people think she didn’t earn the praise/awards she received.” Which doesn’t at all imply I don’t think she earned it, nor that she didn’t earn those awards/praise; just some people don’t think she did. I’m not saying Juno is overrated, mainly because I don’t care enough to watch it to say either way.

I think my only point, in fact, was that Cody did win the Oscar, and earned or not, it’s on her mantle, so instead of addressing random Intertube critics, she might put her already-recognized writing talent to better use by writing more screenplays.

So yeah, I’m with Genevieve. Not a hater, just don’t care and don’t understand why Cody does, either.

Reply

Ah, Jack, yes, sorry, I totally misread you. Not so much that your first line was a heading, exactly, but I took the bit you addressed to me as a continuation, i.e., that the disproportionate vitriol was related to the resentful whining. And no, I wasn’t meaning to give anyone an out; I just meant that the more hype/praise she received, the more likely people were to throw vitriol her way. And you might call it a wildly demented over-the-top overreaction, but the people complaining would say the same thing about the Oscar she received.

But still, the real issue here: Oscar winner addressing Intertube critics on a MySpace blog?

Then again, there was the time Annie Proulx got her nose in a snit when Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash for Best Picture, so I suppose it’s not unprecedented, exactly (although I doubt Proulx would have had her snit had she won an Oscar). These moments make me think “Shouldn’t you be writing,” at which point I realize, hey, wait, I probably should be, anyway.

Reply

Except that Diablo Cody is not asking to potentially be in charge of the entire country and doesn’t want to outlaw abortion (as far as I can tell.)

Reply

Just because I’m not talented enough to even write one of the pieces of shit screenplays that gets made into a Hollywood movie doesn’t mean I’m not smart enough to recognize one when I see one. Hell, I’m not even talented enough to write Meet the Spartans. But I can still tell from shit. Her defensive logic of “I can do it but you can’t so shut up” doesn’t hold up too well.

Reply

I really liked Juno, and I was expecting to hate it. I was expecting a sort of female version of Napoleon Dynamite, and at first that’s what I thought was going to be delivered. OMG I’m drinking juice, looking at a couch while yelling at a little dog! How random!”

But I think people are right in saying if you think the dialogue is not authentic, it’s because Juno is a teenager trying to be cool. She is trying to come off ‘white hipster’ because that is her ‘image’. But then glimpses of the girl behind the facade show the real emotion.

What I really liked about it was that it was a simple story, but really well written. Just when you think it is going to go off on a dramatic tangent, it comes back to a more real outcome.

I really wonder sometimes if there would be all this fuss if the script was written by a middle aged man whose previous job was a tax account, as opposed to Diablo Cody.

Having said that, I don’t know why she would feel the need to vigorously defend herself from the anonymous ramblings of internet

Reply

Exactly, Will. There’s a significant amount of luck– one in a million shot– at achieving fame and fortune in the movie biz. Of course, almost everyone who gets into the business knows this. It’s not a shock, and you’re accepting that gamble whenever you dedicate your life to writing screenplays or shooting microbudget flicks in a convenience store. But still, people work damn hard creating some damn fine material in this nearly-hopeless pursuit. It’s natural to feel jealousy and disdain for someone so untalented receiving such broad acclaim for writing material they would have dismissed as forced and unnatural.

People toil their whole lives, only to watch hacks like Cody coast by with her “Pretty Woman” rags-to-riches feel-good story. She’s undeserving of such praise, and that’s been the story with award shows going down in history. But she really needs to spare me the schoolyard “where’s your statue, smart guy” routine, as if that proves anything. The media latched onto her “former stripper makes good” story like a junkyard dog. She hit the jackpot in mass-coverage and managed to pander votes out of an out-of-touch Academy who thought she was provocative and edgy. She’s neither, and the worst thing she can possibly do at this point is start buying into her own hype. She’s on borrowed time, and man, those fifteen minutes of fame are counting down, because she’s going to get exposed as a fluke with her next attempt at a screenplay.

Bet.

Reply

“But I think people are right in saying if you think the dialogue is not authentic, it’s because Juno is a teenager trying to be cool. She is trying to come off ‘white hipster’ because that is her ‘image’.”

Look at Cody’s writing style on her blog. THAT’S how she writes. She wasn’t writing a character, she was injecting her hipster BS into characters. It’s part of her “vagenda”.
That sounds like a hack to me.

Reply