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• Objection to Juno Review
• The Devil Wears Nada
• The Short Side of the Oscars
• Ancient Aborigines and $6 Australian Wine
• Letting Go Of The Hate

Believe me, I fully recognize that a guy pretty much has to be a moron and a glutton for punishment to criticize Diablo Cody at this point. Either that or he has to be a very, very brave man, a man with the stones of Anton Chigurh.

I'll plead absolutely guilty on the first counts. As to the second, well, yes, ma'am, I do believe I'm your man there as well.

Let me get some things out of the way before I move ahead with my ill-advised temerity (and I'm willing to acknowledge that I have no idea whether temerity is always, by its very nature, ill-advised, but I'm aware of the possibility).

I know Diablo Cody is a very smart woman, and based on her work I would know this even if she hadn't let slip in interviews that she has the stratospheric IQ of the average postal service Mensan. She's a sharp, smart character, and almost all of her writing that I've seen has been very sharp, very smart, and frequently funny.

The writing in Juno is often very sharp, very smart, and very funny. The problem is that it is not the way real people talk; it's the way people talk on television sitcoms, and I guess I hold films to a slightly higher standard, at least films that get nominated for Academy Awards --films like Kramer Vs Kramer, Forrest Gump, Braveheart, and Titantic. I promise you that I wouldn't have a single complaint if Juno were nominated for an Emmy, particularly if they had a category for the snappy Post-Modern After-School Special.

I understand that the legend has it that Ms. Cody birthed the Juno screenplay in the restroom at some suburban Target, washing down fistfuls of truck stop speed with two-liter jugs of RC Cola or some such while hunched over a laptop balanced precariously on the diaper changing station. Fine, I'll buy that if you really want to make a stink about it. I also believe, however, that she had some help from a handful of down-on-their-luck former Different Strokes and Family Ties writers (Don't get me wrong: I am not saying that any of these people were in the women's room with her). And I'm also pretty damn sure that somebody from The Simpsons or The Family Guy sprinkled a little fairy dust on the thing before she turned it over to Jason Reitman.

I have other problems with the movie, yes, but I guess I also have a few problems with the mythology that I should get out of the way first. I don't, for instance, believe that Diablo Cody was ever a stripper. I just don't. I know she wrote a memoir about the "experience," but I also know that that doesn't prove a damn thing. Wouldn't you think if this story were true, we'd have been inundated with backbiting and lecherous accounts from former co-workers and the habitués of the establishments where she purportedly worked? Maybe I'm not paying proper attention --although I think I am, and I think it's hard not to-- but I haven't heard a peep.

I can't blame her for coming up with a colorful back-story. We all love colorful back-stories. They make the strangers we obsess about all the more interesting, and they're somehow even more interesting if they allow us to imagine the strangers we obsess about bare-assed naked and covered with tattoos. I'll admit it: if I had a biography or a resume I certainly wouldn't hesitate to pad the damn thing with all manner of outrageous fabrications. All the same, I don't believe a word of this particular tall tale --don't believe Cody was a stripper, don't believe she was a coal miner, and don't believe that she was the night janitor in a crematorium. I don't even believe she's from suburban Kentucky. I mean, seriously people, do you honestly believe there even is a suburban Kentucky?

There isn't, but if there were, I can pretty much guarantee you that sixteen-year-old suburban Kentucky girls wouldn't be listening to Patti Smith or the Stooges or Mott the Fucking Hoople. And I hope to God they wouldn't be listening to Kimya Dawson and the Moldy Peaches, either, because if so than the place as I imagine it just got a whole lot more hellish.

My real problems with Juno, I suppose, can be boiled down to this: If it's trying to be subversive it doesn't work. And if it's not trying to be subversive it doesn't work either.

There's too much telling and not enough showing, too much lazy shorthand about virtually every character, and by the end I don't feel like I really know or care about a single person in the entire movie (well, maybe I cared a little bit about the dad and step-mom, even if they didn't seem remotely real to me). The stammering, dorky boyfriend --played by the same stammering dork who played the same stammering dorky character in Superbad-- is, we are told, "cool." He's in a band. He also, I presume, likes the same sort of impossibly hip music Juno likes. Yet all we see him do is run around in shorts and a sweatband. The poor, improbably fertile dork does nothing but run and run. Is this supposed to be a metaphor? And, yes, one canned moment of sweetness passes between Juno and the dork, but other than that the kid doesn't much seem to understand the gravity of the situation, and we get absolutely nothing in the way of character development that would allow us to see him through Juno's eyes. She just tells us that he's the coolest guy she knows, and we pretty much have to take her word for it.

I'd also love to know what's up with Juno's best friend. Who is this girl? Does she not seem like exactly the sort of vacuous nobody that someone like Juno would openly mock? At any rate, she's ultimately nothing but what she seems, because we get exactly nothing about her to form anything but a surface impression.

And does not Juno have a little sister in this film? Am I imagining that? And if I'm not imagining it, why does Juno have a little sister? Why is this kid in the movie? Get rid of her. Let some other movie adopt her. She serves no purpose.

I'm pretty sure I could go on and on (just as I'm pretty sure that Diablo Cody --whoever she really is-- is going to have a long, fine career and that her pending horror film will be exactly the sort of riot she's most suited to write), but my ultimate problem with Juno was that in the end, in what felt like a terrible cop-out to me, the cute-as-a-button smartass turns her baby over to the one pathetic person in the entire film who is most ill-equipped to live in the world Cody's characters inhabit.

And as long as we're on the subject of the Oscars, and since I know you come here expecting regular, sharp criticism of the current state of the cinema, I may as well offer some impressions of a couple of the other nominated films I paid eight dollars to see and did not much enjoy.

I love Cormac McCarthy. I generally enjoy the Coen Brothers. And I wish like hell I hadn't seen No Country For Old Men. It's like McCarthy and the Coens teamed up to write an episode of the Andy Griffith Show for the End Times:

Deputy rushes into the room, clearly agitated: Sheriff! A truckload of Mexicans turned up just outside of town and they've been shot all to blazes! You wanna drive out to take a look?

Sheriff is sitting at a table in a diner, squinting at the newspaper and shaking his head incredulously. He hesitates, and doesn't look up from the paper: No sir, I don't believe I do.

In No Country, just as in this country, the world is going to hell in a hurry. Evil, inexplicably represented by a man with a bad haircut and a pneumatic cattle zapper, is an unstoppable force. The poor, old, beleaguered Sheriff just can't be bothered anymore to do anything but mope around and offer homespun philosophical ruminations. The crafty Vietnam vet who finds the satchel of cash comes up with all manner of crafty maneuvers to outfox his pursuers, yet never thinks to transfer all that money into a slightly less distinctive --not to mention cumbersome-- carrying case. Woody Harrelson shows up and displays remarkable skills of clairvoyance in locating both the man on the run and the money, but then --just like that-- he's dead. Then --just like that-- pretty much everybody else is dead as well, except for Evil, which still walks among us dragging his pneumatic cattle zapper, and the poor, old, beleaguered Sheriff, who right up to the bitter end offers homespun philosophical ruminations to anybody who's still alive to listen.

That's about it. The whole thing looks awfully nice, though, I'll give it that.

Ratatouille also looks awfully nice, but it also sucks. I'm sorry, but I just think it's a tall order to make the whole rats-in-the-kitchen thing palatable, particularly when we're talking about obnoxious rats, and scads of them. I had a huge problem with the lazy, jackhammer way Brad Bird and his associates named their characters --the snobby food critic is named Anton Ego! Get it? There's also a Gusteau, a Linguini, a Pompidou, a Django, and a Skinner. Could you maybe take more than five fucking minutes to name your characters before we hand you a Best Screenplay nomination? Is that really asking too much?

And, finally, there's the sheer ignorance of the main human character, Remy. Throughout the entire stinking film the guy has a rat on his head pulling his hair and putting him through all manner of contortions making the same damn dishes over and over, yet somehow, when the rat disappears, the moron doesn't know how to recreate the recipes he's made hundreds of times? What the hell?

Somebody in Hollywood --and it might as well be Diablo Cody-- better send me a check for $24, pronto. I'm for damn sure not going to drag my ass out to see Atonement until they do.