My Sister's Movie Education

Last week, my sister decided that I was woefully uneducated in quality films.  She dropped by my parents place to hand me three films that she adored and wanted to see what I thought.  Always a dangerous question.

They all ended up being chick flicks, which I’m honestly okay with.  Unless the movie is Gone in 60 Seconds, I would rather watch a drama than a special effects carnival anyway.  But that Gone in 60 Seconds, well… that movie I never get tired of.

But to her picks, the first film I ended up watching with her was Juno.  To be honest, I’d been wanting to see Juno.  I avoided it for a while because the promos were hideous.  My impression was that I’d be sitting through a couple hours of teenage pregnancy being played for laughs.  Not interested.  By the time it came out on DVD, though, I’d been hearing a completely different story about it.  Still, I never quite made time for it until now.

My first surprise when I started watching it was the cast.  Michael Cera and Jason Bateman from Arrested Development, Jennifer Garner from Alias and 13 Going on 30, J.K. Simmons from the Spiderman movies, and I even recognized Ellen Page from X-Men: The Last Stand.  Heck, they even had Rainn Wilson from The Office step in for the first two minutes of the film.  These are some pretty big names going into this film.  My expectations for this movie went up.

And they met them.  Juno, high school moron, finds out she’s pregnant and tries to handle everything herself.  She first decides to abort and gets cold feet, and then prepares to put the kid up for adoption before she tells her parents anything.  And even after admitting to her parents, she continues to act more mature than she actually is.  Getting pregnant, oddly, was not enough to wake her up.  It takes her a while to actually hit rock bottom, but when she does, it is a spectacular splash.

In a weird way, Juno is the nearly opposite of a coming of age story.  Instead of learning to take on everything herself, Juno has to learn to stay out of the grown up world and be a kid a while longer.  And in its own way, this movie has a lot of important things to say about parenthood and the value children place on marriages working out, not just in their own families but in society as a whole.

There are a lot of jokes about the pregnancy, especially at the start, and while they were funny, none of them were there just for a laugh.  Each character’s wisecrack was a way of easing the tension they all felt, especially Juno, who is a sarcastic butt to begin with.  For all the edgy humor, I felt the writers were very sensitive and honest about a really delicate and painful period of this girl’s life.  By the end of the movie, I decided my sister to be a great judge of movies.

Then I saw Easy A and she lost a lot of credibility in the first 15 minutes.  It’s easily the trashiest movie I’ve seen in years.  It’s not often I learn new swear words but Easy A filled that gap in knowledge in a hurry.

The premise isn’t bad: Emma Stone’s character, Olive, tells one lie about how she went on a date over the weekend, and in no time at all, the school’s rumor mill has her pegged as the local teen harlot.  In a fit of pique, she decides to embrace the rumors and uses her new reputation to get things and accomplish stuff she couldn’t do before until, inevitably, the lies bite her in the butt.

A story like this should have been great.  There’s a core of honesty about the rumor mill that I haven’t seen in many other movies.  I had a friend a few years back who made a few indiscretions as a teenager; they were stupid but nothing that was truly damaging.  However, one misunderstanding a parent in town made caused nearly everybody in his church to believe that he was an alcoholic and drug pusher.  He was ostracized for nearly two years and he had no idea what was going on.  It wasn’t until his family moved away that he finally figured out what had happened; by then, it was too late to change anything.  The rumor mill had destroyed his reputation.

Easy A could have been a great commentary on this social aberration.  The writing was certainly clever and the actors had a lot of charm, even in the bit roles.

Instead, I got annoyed with everybody in the film, and the more charming they were, the worse it was.  Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci were brilliant as Olive’s mom and dad; they were likeable and funny… and the worst parents ever.  Instead of actively trying to figure out what was going on in her life, they were deliberately oblivious to what was going on, and instead of being a support, became clueless commentators on her behavior.

And, really, nobody seemed to have actual parents as the story progresses, or if they do, they have incredibly weak spines.  And these brats that are supposed to be in high school never feel like they’re teenagers, but adults with 10 IQ points taken off.

Did I mention it was trashy?

My sister had one chance left to make me think of her as a decent movie critic.  Pitch Perfect was her offering.  It’s pretty recent; it came out last year.  It’s a college story, and it feels more like college than Easy A’s high school felt like high school.  Beca is a new kid on campus, interested in pursuing a DJ career but gets her arm twisted into joining the Barden Bellas, one of the school’s several a capella groups.

The story is not ground breaking.  It’s a classic underdog tale where the Barden Bellas have tough competition, don’t get along with each other, but at the end come together and wow everyone.  I called everything from the get-go, but that’s okay, because all the actresses were fun, quirky, and sexy, and the actors all hit the right tone.

I did have a pleasant surprise as well.  The leader of the Barden Bellas, Aubrey, who comes off as an overbearing and judgmental witch, is actually my favorite character.  If anything, she comes off as the most well-rounded character in the story.  After humiliating herself so bad at that start of the film that all her actions are not mean-spirited; she’s just trying to recover her lost dignity and is going about it the wrong way.  I ended up rooting for her more than anyone else.

For all that, though, this is a musical.  Story is important, but in musicals, it doesn’t matter how good your story is: if the music sucks, nobody’s going to sit through it.  It’s my pleasure to say that the music did not suck, but was better than par.  At times, it was downright brilliant.

There aren’t any original songs in the film.  Everything is a cover performance, so in that regard, this is not a normal musical.  But I enjoy reinterpretation of familiar songs and I’m especially a fan of a capella.  The movie delivers.  The women do some amazing things with their voices, but if I’m going to be honest, the movie makes a point of putting the women as the underdogs, so for the bulk of the movie and for the sake of story, they’re deliberately singing below their talent level.  The men in the rival group do not have these story restrictions, so every song they sing is brilliant and I would not mind owning the soundtrack just to hear their performances again and again.

And the somewhat cheesy “riff-off” might be the best part of the whole film.

My sister redeemed herself.

And then she disparaged all the good John Hughes movies and thus everything she says is rendered suspect.