Thursday 25 November 2010

Juno

The film Juno is relevant to my idea and the issues included could be explored in my play.

Juno is a 2007 comedy-drama film directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody. Ellen Page stars as the title character, an independent-minded teenager confronting an unplanned pregnancy and the subsequent events that put pressures of adult life onto her. The film premiered on September 8 at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, receiving a standing ovation.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and earned three other Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Page. The film's soundtrack, featuring several songs performed by Kimya Dawson in various guises, was the first number one soundtrack since Dream girls and 20th Century Fox's first number one soundtrack since Titanic. Juno earned back its initial budget of $6.5 million in twenty days, the first nineteen of which were when the film was in limited release. The film has gone on to earn more than 35 times that amount for a total of $231 million, becoming the highest grossing film in distributor Fox Searchlight Pictures’ history.
Juno received numerous positive reviews from critics, many of whom placed the film on their top ten lists for the year. The film has also received both criticism and praise from members of both the pro-life and pro-choice communities regarding its treatment of abortion.

Themes
"You can look at it as a film that celebrates life and celebrates childbirth, or you can look at it as a film about a liberated young girl who makes a choice to continue being liberated. Or you can look at it as some kind of twisted love story, you know, a meditation on maturity."

Diablo Cody Along with Knocked Up and Waitress, two other 2007 films about women facing unplanned pregnancies, Juno was interpreted by some critics as having a pro-life theme. Ann Hulbert of Slate magazine believed that Juno "[undercut] both pro-life and pro-choice purism. Hadley Freeman of The Guardian criticized Juno for a hat-trick of American comedies in the past 12 months that present abortion as unreasonable, or even unthinkable—a telling social sign", though she noted, "I don't believe any of these films is consciously designed to be anti-abortion propaganda."[8] A. O. Scott, writing for The New York Times, agreed that Juno has "an underlying theme, a message that is not anti-abortion but rather pro-adulthood". [9] Ellen Page commented, "What I get most frustrated at is when people call it a pro-life movie, which is just absurd... The most important thing is the choice is there, and the film completely demonstrates that. Cody and Page have openly stated that they are pro-choice; Reitman thought that it was "fantastic" that both pro-life and pro-choice groups were embracing the film. He said that "Juno seems to be a mirror, and people [on both sides] see themselves in it.

The main issues in this are abortion, adoption, alienation and planning for the birth and the life of a child.

the link to the trailer is: