Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Juno Part II
I've been thinking about BEM's question--whether I truly thought the "homeskillet" comment was the funniest thing about Juno. Not only was it a genuinely a funny line, the fact that most people don't find it funny says to me that they actually liked Ellen Page's lines better, which I don't because they aren't as funny when a cynical teenager says them. Dwight Schrute (essentially) saying it makes it awkward/cringe comedy because he's a grown-ass man working in a 7-11 who assumes he knows better than a precocious teenage girl--a girl, who, by her own admission, doesn't know "what kind of girl she is." But she does know that she's alienated and cynical--thus all the tiresome "fashizzle" speak. I did like how the film honors every subjectivity, but I kinda agree with this script as an apt parody of Diablo Cody's writing style.
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2 comments:
"Juno" is often funny, snappy, engaging, surprising and cool. It is also often tin-eared, overwritten and trying way, waaaaay too hard. I resisted seeing it because the trailer was just godawful, and the Schrute line was the most egregious example.
Fast-paced, quippy, reference-heavy dialogue doesn't have to sound "real" to be enjoyable (See: "The Thin Man" movies, Sturges, Whedon, Sherman-Palladino, etc.), but it has to be delivered perfectly by the actors, guided by a sure hand in the director. The scene in question felt like an amateur, Kevin-Smith-worshipping screenwriter trying to cram an entire movie's worth of clever into one scene, so people would keep reading/watching.
The homeskillet line is annoying because it's a triple-stack of irony ("He says 'homeskillet,' because he's out of touch, but he knows he's out of touch, but doesn't know HOW out of touch"), and it just comes out sounding like something George Lucas would write if he made a contemporary version of "American Graffiti."
Finally, just because we like an actor in something else, it does not mean they earn a free pass on all future endeavors. This is the Jason Schwartzman rule.
Schwartzman rule granted, but the homeskillet line is still the best because people who don't know how out of touch they are are, but act as if irony saves them from this are funnier than those who merely don't know, like the dad in American Pie.
So where would the guy with nunchucks and a mullet in Ghost World fit in? He also occurs in a 7-11 scene, interestingly. I found him funny in a way Joe Dirt and other mullet white trash stereotypes aren't funny at all.
The best example of this kind of 7-11/trailer humor is Trailer Park Boys, esp the episode when the trailer becomes a night club and the sign above the door says " ' Licenced' " as if merely putting quotes around it makes it official. They know they'll get caught; they know they are losers; but the joke is for each other--and the ideal viewer who likes them enough to be "one of them," rather than the viewer who watches out of near pure contempt.
So for Juno's Schrute character, I think it comes down to viewer-ID and whether to add or subtract that extra later of irony. Juno-Schrute accepts his class position, and isn't talking down to Juno at all. He's using her exact same language while also satirizing paternalism--he's old enough to be her father and that this is somehow "fatherly" advice that he, a loser, is giving! Whereas the Bateman character never attempts the discourse, he speaks the music lingo, which the movie codes as "authentic" and with less ironic distance as other discourses. Even when they don't like each other's music, they just don't. No "Okay, I'll like it cause it's cheesy." Schrute-Juno's many levels of irony break down the mere two levels of the others (authentic-ironic): he's given up at finding a "safe position" from which to utter, and I think this comes from his lower class position as a 7-11 clerk. Bateman still has time to make something of his life, and Juno--c'mon--pure potential, there. But Schrute? Oi....
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