Page 3 of 4
JUNO Ellen Page (Hard Candy) is pure perfection as the title character, a spunky and verbose teen who finds herself pregnant after a dalliance with sweet classmate Paulie Bleeker (Superbad's Michael Cera). After careful research, she decides on the adoptive parents: Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), a tightly wound businesswoman who wants a child in the worst way, and Mark (Jason Bateman), a TV jingle composer who tends to live in the past. But Juno's idea of how everything should proceed doesn't exactly pan out, and her sarcastic front falters in the face of fear and uncertainty, revealing the child underneath. Perhaps because it's written by a woman – and a former stripper at that – Juno is already receiving the sort of knee-jerk backlash that tellingly was never foisted upon Judd Apatow's similarly themed Knocked Up. Yet Diablo Cody's script is more balanced than Apatow's: The laughs are plentiful in both, but Cody places more emphasis on the emotional fallout, with Juno and Bleeker awkwardly trying to express their feelings for each other and Vanessa's anxiety almost palpable as she worries that Juno might change her mind about handing over the baby (Garner is excellent in her best film role to date). Cody's dialogue may not always be believable (how many 16-year-old girls reference Dario Argento, let alone Soupy Sales and Seabiscuit?), but its intelligence and quirky humor qualify as music to the ears of moviegoers tired of witless banter. And speaking of music, the soundtrack is a keeper as well, with eccentric tunes that complement the action. Kicking up a fuss (much like Juno's unborn child), this is one of the year's best releases. ***1/2
THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES Another movie season, another attempt to jump-start a film franchise aimed at family audiences. Yet The Spiderwick Chronicles, based on the books by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi, is one of the better adaptations in this field, which has taken some severe body blows lately with the dismal failures of the cluttered The Golden Compass and the dreadful The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising. Smoothly directed by Mark Waters, the miracle worker responsible for Lindsay Lohan's two best performances (Freaky Friday and Mean Girls), Spiderwick displays a lighter touch than other fantasy films of this nature, meaning that its thrills are all the more unexpected – and effective. Freddie Highmore, the talented young star of Finding Neverland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, essays the roles of twin brothers Jared (troublemaker) and Simon (bookworm), who, along with mom Helen Grace (Mary-Louise Parker) and older sister Mallory (Sarah Bolger), take up residence in an ancestral home that harbors some interesting inhabitants. And living in the woods beyond the house are a murderous ogre (voiced by, of all people, Nick Nolte) and his goblin minions, all hell-bent on obtaining a book (presently in Jared's possession) that would wreak havoc both on our world and the one inhabited by fairies and other mystical creatures. The CGI characters (including ones voiced by Martin Short and Seth Rogen) are sure to delight the kids, but for older viewers, they represent the least memorable aspects of this movie; far more affecting (and reminiscent of Steven Spielberg's earliest blockbusters) are the sequences that center on the relationships between the Graces – all struggling to cope with Helen's impending divorce – and how the notion of family directly plays into their interactions with the fantasy world in their backyard. ***
THERE WILL BE BLOOD I'm not sure Daniel Day-Lewis' performance represents the best acting of 2007, but it certainly represents the most acting of the past year. Then again, his oversized turn is right in line with Paul Thomas Anderson's oversized ambitions in creating a modern-day masterpiece, a movie so audacious that it flagrantly apes Citizen Kane and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at various points. But Anderson's latest isn't even up to the standards of what I consider his real masterpiece, the dazzling, dizzying Boogie Nights, though there's enough here to please adventurous moviegoers. Based on Upton Sinclair's Oil! this centers on Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis), a powerful oilman who has an adopted son in young H.W. (Dillon Freasier) and a nemesis in unctuous preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). There Will Be Blood, therefore, is a story about the feud between Plainview and Eli that doubles as the battle between bald capitalism and insincere spirituality (in that respect, the movie could be set today), as well as a more personal tale involving Plainview and his adopted boy. That the former plotline is more interesting than the latter throws the film off balance, a flaw accentuated by the fact that no attempt to understand Plainview provides the film with a hollow center that separates it from the likes of Citizen Kane and Sierra Madre (wherein we cared about their protagonists even after they took leave of their senses). Still, the picture is a beauty to behold, and there are individual sequences so staggering that a second viewing will hardly be a chore. ***