Juno

[Drunk Monk]

It was sweet, but a small film to garner such Oscar attention. Ellen Page was really good. Garner and Janney were good too - nice to see them make the jump to the big screen. Some wickedly funny dialog at points but a bit overrated. It was told in a proper linear timeline and there were no amazing one shot sequences. No good fight scenes to speak of...

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

What a crappy sound track. Maybe I'm not hip enough to enjoy it?

I thought it was going to be another "Little Miss Sunshine" event. A lot of hype about a supposed great must see film that turned out be to be junk. And for the first twenty minutes or so, I was counting the times I laughed out loud. I could because there were so few.

I think what finally engaged me was the Jennifer Garner character. She was just so crazy in a believable way. Or you could call it desperate. And the movie started to take some unexpected turns; The icky relationship with Jason Bateman (who I like more and more), the wierd friends, and the parents.

I thought a lot of the dialogue was too precocious. It didn't seem to reflect the language of teenagers, only how the writer thought really cool teenage characters would sound. But it settled down after a while.

This movie might have to find you in the right mood, and it almost didn't for me. Still it garnered (Jennifer, see?) a lot more hype than it deserved.

[Drunk Monk]

Although I must confess I laughed more at LMS. Alan Arkin's character was really funny, but super creepy at the end. Both films had a very disturbing element that way. Is it the complex engenue that makes these films popular with the critics? That's creepy too.

[The Queen]

What made this film interesting was the acting -- stellar cast making the most out the characters. Lesser actors and the whole thing would have been a two-dimensional cliché. I don't know how much was actually in the script and how much was what the actors did with it.

JK Simmons was great -- I always enjoy watching JK Simmons. Good thing, as he's in EVERYTHING.