I Am Legend & Juno

Among all the cheery crap of the holiday weekend, I finally made it to a few other movies. First, the overblown The Omega Man remake: I Am Legend and second, the wickedly funny coming-of-age story: Juno.

I, like millions of American movie junkies, was initially impressed by the sleek marking of I Am Legend. (Remeber the tagline: "The last man on earth is not alone".) The trailer consisted of 29.9 seconds of setup: Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith) is the last man on earth. He’s hunting in an abandoned Times Square, etc. Then night falls, and for a tenth of a second we see a monster dash across the screen and hear a creepy howl. Now that sounds like a movie I want to see! Right?

Well, get to the movie and get one look at the “monsters” (which, incidentally happens way too early in the story) and suddenly it’s not so exciting anymore. It’s the classic “fear of the unknown” affect. Once you know what’s there, the fear is cut in half. And like the trailer, 99% of the movie’s runtime is devoted to exposition and only in the final minutes do we dispense with pesky things like plot.

Juno, on the other hand, was quite a refreshing change of pace. As I may have predicted, I was already exposed to some of the best jokes from the 30 or 40 times I watched the trailer online. However, the rest of the film kept up pretty well. Director Jason Reitman worked some world-class talent and Diablo Cody’s a witty back-and-forth dialog, littered with pop-culture references, into a very unlikely contender for major awards.

Ellen Page (Juno MacGuff) really deserves all of the credit she’s already gotten for her slice-of-life portrayal of a teenager who uses a smart-ass attitude to detract attention from the very real difficult decisions she is faced with. Not to mention, she not only held her own but sustained subtle onscreen chemistry in scenes with her co-star and rising comic-heavyweight Jason Bateman. And probably a less-mentioned, but equally endearing performance was delivered by Allison Janney as Juno’s step-mom, Bren. OK, so I might be a bit biased because: Damn I love Allision Janney! Juno makes me wish she was my mom.

But, by all accounts, this is a hell of the weekend to get to the movies.

I Am Legend

(2/5)

Juno

(4.5/5)