David Edelstein of New York Magazine has taken it upon himself to welcome the Juno Generation. My question is, really?
Does Juno represent the teen-ager of today? I'm genuinely asking the question, and would appreciate any genuine answers.
I’m skeptical. I see Edelstein's point about teen-agers living without a zone of privacy and existing in their own film. Perhaps I too easily dismiss kids these days as technology-addicted gamers and robotic pop princesses, more like Juno’s cheerleader friend than Juno herself. But perhaps that impression is a couple years out of date.
While film critic Luke Y. Thompson, posting on Hollywood-Elsewhere, wonders about the movie’s shortfall of cell phones, I wonder, do sixteen year olds nowadays regularly drop the names of Iggy Pop and the Stooges and Dario Argento? Or is that more the province of bloggers with screenwriting aspirations, like Diablo Cody? Do they, as I've experienced when mentioning other pop culture names, dismiss them as unnecessary old news? Juno and her aspirations – hipness, being in an underground band, etc. - strike me as coming from the mid-nineties, and from someone more college-aged.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure teen-agers like Juno exist. There may well be at least four of them across the continent. I find her plausible, which is the standard. I’m more just distressed by the stadium-seat sociology that seems set to accompany the film.
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2 comments:
This is not the "Juno Generation." The "Juno Generation" applies to overly clever writers, like Diablo Cody, who THINK that all teenagers talk like mathematicians. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the movie JUNO, but I look at it as a farce (maybe even a pseudo-satire) more than an accurate summation of where the teenage mind exists today.
Actionman .... I think you're about right. And I don't have a problem with that being the case.
There's so much crossfire on this film that it's hard to fall in the middle.
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