:: gia’s blog ::

Before Christmas, Sizemore and I helped Think Jam organise the Bloggers/Twitter/Seesmic screening of Juno. The whole blogang was there plus a bunch of Twitterpeeps I’d never met.

The film was written by Cody Diablo who some of you may know from her blog Pussy Ranch. She was writing Pussy Ranch when she lived in Minneapolis and being from Minnesota myself I used to read her regularly. She stopped to go write a book and then I lost track of her… I was so surprised when I found out she’d written this film. She’s now blogging at MySpace – surely that must be some Fox/Searchlight/Murdoch-related thing cos, I mean, why use MySpace??!

Anyway, the film. It absolutely, completely and utterly rules. It’s about a teenaged girl – Juno – who finds herself pregnant and decides to put the baby up for adoption. That makes it sound boring and crap as all hell. It’s not.

The film is in the same vein as previous Searchlight dorkomedies like Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite, but is just so damned cool with it. The writing is beyond excellent, the soundtrack beats even Hallam Foe’s (and that’s saying something) and it’s genuinely laugh out loud funny – during the screening there were times when the laughter was so loud that it almost drowned out the film (100 people and one of the best sound systems in London). It was fab to see Jason Bateman who I LOVED in the 80s (he also reminds me of LondonFilmGeek!) and, I have to admit, the Minnesota accents from some of the characters made me grin like a goon.

I left the screening feeling so joyously happy to be alive… and it’s not that often that a film makes you want to skip down the street. Juno was one of those films for me.

Anyway, it’s out in the UK from the 8th of February and I would strongly, strongly suggest you go see it.