Juno – Special Edition (Blu-ray with Digital Copy DVD-ROM)

 

Picture: B     Sound: B     Extras: C     Film: C

 

 

Jason Reitman got very lucky.  Though he did not write Juno, he has been getting about as much credit as the creator, Academy Award winner for Best Screenplay Diablo Cody, whose credit received publicity for her past versus the content of the film.  Without her, this would have been a total disaster, but in Reitman’s hands, is lucky is works at all.

 

Ellen Page is the title character, a realist and semi-depressed young lady who more or less has a boyfriend (Michael Cera of Superbad, saving this film from further trouble in very convincing casting) that she becomes pregnant by.  Of course, she could get an abortion, legal or even illegal, but likes her boyfriend, decides to take the pregnancy to term and chooses to have the child to put up for adoption.  No matter what the outcome, part of the point of the film is to be a character study of the people and a look at an all-too common situation film of any kind seems unable to address.

 

Valiant as that may be and as good as Cody’s writing can get, the film has several glaring issues that critics seemed to want to ignore for any number of reasons.  For one thing, I though Page’s deadpan performance was two-note at best, felt like Daria-lite and never totally rang true in the long run and with any consistency, rendering it more like a by-the-numbers bit that we can blame Reitman’s maleness for in negating the finer points of what is a female view of the world script.  The differences seem more like some condescending anti-abortion campaign.

 

Also, the supporting cast is a plus, but there is a sense of unreal throughout that may add up in the phony times we live in, especially media wise, but Juno is never raw or palpable and this will be more apparent when Cody does a follow-up script with Reitman.  I loved how Reitman went around talking about being a storyteller when that is such a dangerous generality.  We’ll see how much longer he can coast before that mentality catches up with him.

 

The 1080p 1.85 X 1 AVC @ 28 MBPS digital High Definition image did originate on film, but there are just too many soft moments from the shoot and not the transfe4r thanks to the cinematography of Director of Photography Eric Steelberg whose work has been uneven to date.  It adds to the phoniness.  The dialogue-based soundtrack is decorated with problematic music throughout, so the DTS HD Master Audio (MA) lossless 5.1 mix can only do so much, but it at least sounds better than the Dolby Digital 5.1 English, Spanish and French mixes here.  Mateo Messina’s score is not that good either.

 

Extras includes an audio commentary by Reitman and Cody, deleted scenes with their comments, screen tests, cast/crew jam, gag reel/gag take, four making of featurettes, two Fox Movie Channel shows promoting the film and a bonus DVD-ROM so you can download a digital copy by putting the disc in a PC or like player hooked to the Internet, then retrieve a full-length low-def copy.

 

I doubt a portable version of the film will prevent pregnancy, as it is the oddest choice to get this digital download treatment after it was only used for action films so far, but here it is for what that is worth.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo