Juno

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Release Date: December 14th, 2007 (limited)

Starring: Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Olivia Thirlby, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney, Rainn Wilson

Directed by: Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking)

Premise: Faced with an unplanned pregnancy, an offbeat young woman makes an unusual and bizarre decision regarding her unborn child.

[matt35mm]

The Alaska thing was maybe the funniest thing I've seen in a trailer this year.

[pete]

indie knocked up.

[modage]

indie knocked up.

exactly.  but i still think this is going to be REALLY good.

[cine]

saw the premiere of this too. met jason, diablo and ellen afterwards. because a girl gets pregnant and they didn't plan for it doesn't make it an another knocked up. the focus of the movie is entirely different. knocked up is about a couple and how they deal with growing up and dealing with a baby.. juno is all about ellen page's character. michael cera is hardly even in the movie. i'd say jason bateman has a heavier role in the film than cera.

but yeah, the movie was great, got a standing ovation from the crowd on all the nights it played. ebert said ellen could be looking at an oscar nod but i would predict diablo for her screenplay before anything else.

[Pubrick]

mini linda cardellini.

[MacGuffin]

Telluride Interview: Jason Reitman, Director of 'Juno'
Source: Cinematical

Jason Reitman's second feature film, Juno, turned out to be the surprise hit of the Telluride Film Festival, before moving on to Toronto. Reitman took time out of his last day at Telluride to sit down and chat about his film, why it works, and why guys just don't want to grow up.

(NOTE: This interview is a discussion of the film that contains spoilers, so if you don't want to know anything about it before you see it, stop reading now.)

Cinematical: Let's talk about how you found the Juno script to begin with and why you wanted to film it.

Jason Reitman: I was fortunate enough that I had Mason Novack (Diablo's manager) found Diablo, and I knew Mason, and so I had a copy of the script as soon as it came out.

Cinematical: And what did you like about the script? What did Diablo do right?

JR: What she did right was this: She took a very tricky piece of material and made interesting decisions at every turn. Every time a character had a line of dialog, every scene, she made the interesting, unexpected decision. Not the usual decision, but that was not precious, but that was honest and real and sometimes very funny. That's what I liked about Thank You for Smoking. That film turns on the world of cigarettes, and Chris Buckley makes those kinds of unusual, hilarious decisions at every turn. Diablo does the same thing, and she's very good at it.

Cinematical: Do you look specifically for that in choosing what scripts you want to work with? That angle?

JR: I love the tough stuff. I'm really attracted to movies about tricky subject matter, where it's dealt with in ways that are unexpected, that aren't too dramatic and precious. That's not to say that this movie doesn't have heart, it does have heart, and I think the ending is very moving. That said, it's the fact that she took on tricky material and didn't treat it that way.

Cinematical: I want to talk about the casting. When you first read the script, did you know from the start you wanted Ellen Page?

JR: I'd read the screenplay, had not really pictured anyone, and then saw Hard Candy and I was like, that's the girl.

Cinematical: Did you see her in An American Crime?

JR: No, no, noooooo. I've heard that's raw. I've heard that's really tough to watch. When it came time to cast, I got Michael Cera, JK Simmons, Olivia Thirlby, and I brought them to over, set them in front of a black backdrop shot 45-50 pages, all in one day, and then cut it together, then I showed it to the producers at Fox and said, this is the cast I'd like to have. And they said okay.

Cinematical: Well, that was easy.

JR: Yeah, it really was. It was kind of in lieu of an audition process.

Cinematical: You cast Jennifer Garner, and she's not necessarily the first person I would have thought of, but she gives a fantastic performance.

JR: I'm really proud of what Jennifer did in this film. What she did was very subtle, very complicated. It's through the honesty of her performance that everyone else around her was able to be very funny. The casting of that role was tricky, because it's a woman of a certain age, who you can buy as desperately wanting to be a mother. Someone at you at first find to be a little pushy and unlikeable, and then by the end of the film, it flips, and you've just fallen in love with her. It was very tricky.

Cinematical: Exactly! You start out thinking you know how you feel about those characters, Mark and Vanessa – that she's irritating and uptight, and he's laid back and cool, but then suddenly you realize your feelings have changed.

JR: Right, it flips, and you're like, "Oh my God!" I talked to Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner about The Queen, and how successful they were at doing that switch. At the start of the film, you're thinking that Tony Blair is wonderful and charming, and the Queen is stodgy and set in her ways, and not open-minded. And then by the end of The Queen, it's switched, and you realize the queen is very aware, and that she has this whole global perspective, and it's Tony Blair who is being very short-sighted. They pulled the rug out from under the audience, and that's what we wanted to do.

By the end, you realize he's incapable of growing up, and when you realize that, and that her desire to be a mother is sweet and sincere, you can't help but fall in love with her. And it's very hard to deal with Jason Bateman's character, because it's a very real thing that a lot of guys do. You know, a lot of people ask me what this movie's about, and it's about the moment at which you realize you want to grow up. Ellen Page's character Juno is given the opportunity to grow up at the age of 16. She could become a mother at the age of 16, to become a grownup and deal with some real shit. And a lot of teenage girls deal with that – teenage girls are growing up faster and faster. And in a weird way, this is a movie about teenage girls growing up too fast, and 30-year-old men who don't want to grow up.

Cinematical: I want to get back to the character of Mark. When I talked to Diablo about the script, she said she felt she didn't write that character quite as negatively as you portrayed him and that you really disliked the character.

JR: I actually liked the character a lot, even though he does very unlikable things. I think the things he does, they're very honest. Look, I'm a guy who became a father throughout the process of the making of this film, and I understand the anxieties he's going through. I went through some of those anxieties, but I came around and embraced the idea of fatherhood, I adore my father. And Mark is a guy who caved into those anxieties, who made the wrong decision.

Cinematical: Do you think he made the wrong decision? Or did he make the right decision, in being honest about who he was and about just not really wanting to grow up?

JR: That's what makes it sophisticated. I think if Mark is too likable, it's not interesting. What makes it interesting is that, perhaps he makes the right decision. Perhaps if he stayed with Vanessa, a few years down the road they'd be getting a divorce and it would have been harder on that family. And perhaps he makes the right decision. It's that complicated, real shit that excites me.

Cinematical: A lot of guys in that late 20s-early 30s demographic seem to really struggle with that in this generation. I mean, guys from my dad's generation, your dad's generation, they had babies in their 20s, they went work and supported their families. What's up with this generation?

JR: Yeah, and I don't know if my perception is skewed because I live in Los Angeles, where in their teenage years – they enter their twenties earlier, but they leave their twenties later. The twenties are kind of extended from 15 to 35 in Los Angeles. And I'm not sure if that's a national epidemic of if that's only in Los Angeles, but a lot of guys are blooming later, they're pushing off the idea of marriage and pregnancy, and they're being allowed to, which makes it worse.

Cinematical: Allowed by whom?

JR: It's somehow become culturally okay. Divorce is epidemic, and somehow in line with all that, the whole concept of what marriage is and when it happens has become more flexible. This is a country that really pushes people to be individualistic, and that might weigh on it.

Cinematical: Do you feel differently about Mark as a character now, as a husband and father, than you would have a few years ago? When you were 25, could you have made this movie?

JR: No, I definitely have a different perspective now. And I think there's something to be said about that, about when people should make certain films and the life experience you need to tell certain stories. I empathize with Mark, but I also empathize with Vanessa – the idea that you're not a whole person until you have a child. And I empathize with Juno, the fears she had about bringing a child into our world. Simply the idea of going through a pregnancy. It would have been nowhere as honest, nowhere as emotional, back then.

Cinematical: I wanted to touch on how you worked with Diablo in making this film. You involved her much more than screenwriters often are able to be involved in films.

JR: You know, sometimes directors are scared of the writers. I like writers, I get along with writers very well, I trust writers. With Thank You for Smoking, I really wanted Chris Buckley to be involved. And with Juno, Diablo's voice was so important to the script. And there were times that I would be like, I need a moment that does this, and she'd bang it out right, she'd write a scene write there on set. Or I'd need to make a decision – this character needs to wear a set of clothes, or listen to certain music, what would it be?

Cinematical: There's a lot of Diablo in Juno.

JR: Absolutely, she is that voice. And there's no way that I could emulate that voice. It's funny, Nick Naylor (from Thank You for Smoking) was a character whose voice I could emulate. With Juno, here was a story that I loved, but that voice is not mine. And I would never think to try to write a Juno scene myself. It's just not my voice.

Cinematical: Did you like working on someone else's script versus doing your own?

JR: It's a little bit different, in that you're carrying someone else's baby into the world, and in a weird sense that it's even more precious. You don't want to fuck it up, you don't want to be that guy who ruined something that was beautiful, who ruined something that someone else created. So you're careful, you want to do it right.

[w/o horse]

It reminds me of when Thirteen came out except it sounds like there's a good movie to follow up a good story this time.


Toronto #10: Cinderella story with a twist

/ / / September 15, 2007

By Roger Ebert

TORONTO, Ont.--It's the Cinderella story of this year's Toronto Film Festival. Girl is born in Chicago, grows up, graduates from college, moves to Minneapolis to join her boyfriend Jonny, who she met on the net. Works in advertising, finds it boring. Starts working as a stripper, doesn't find it boring. Changes her name to Diablo Cody. Starts a blog. Works as a phone sex voice. Writes book, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. Quits the sex biz, marries Jonny, moves to suburbs. His daughter is their flower girl at wedding.

That's all boiled down from her bios at IMDb and Amazon. But now we get to the Cinderella part. I am hearing about it from Jason Reitman, the director of "Juno," which in my guess is the most popular film of the festival, and is written by Diablo Cody.

"She met this guy, he was supposed to be a producer, she wasn't sure, but he tells her she should write a screenplay," Reitman tells me. "It takes her two months. She sends it to Hollywood, where it goes all over town and everyone wants to make it. It is one of the best screenplays around."
Reitman, the son of famous director Ivan Reitman, was planning to direct his own screenplay for his second film, after the success of his 2005 written-and-directed "Thank You for Smoking." But he reads "Juno" and knows he must direct it.

His wonderful, funny movie, which I wrote about a few days ago, stars Ellen Page in an Oscar-caliber performance as an intelligent, sassy 16-year-old who gets pregnant. Her father and stepmother don't yell and scream at her but just want to help her out all they can. That, and many other elements of "Juno," are unlike most films about teenagers. Very unlike. I will write more about the movie and my full interview with the likable Jason Reitman when the movie opens around Christmas. Now back to the Cinderella story.

"Juno and her stepmother (Allison Janney) are very close," Reitman says. "That was Diablo's thinking. She thought stepmothers always got a raw deal in fiction. It was the Cinderella model of the stepmother as a witch. But now Diablo is a stepmother herself, and she and her stepdaughter really like each other."

Reitman says when he read her screenplay he thought, "She really nailed the New Nuclear Family. In the movies, families used to be mom, pop and the kids. In real life today, it's often more complicated. You have stepparents, half-brothers and sisters, children of single mothers, every kind of family. But she doesn't write about this in a political way, just in an honest light."

The heroine's family, in fact, us one of the most lovable families in recent films. Whatever Diablo Cody's background was, she wrote a positive, human, hilarious story. "Sometimes I just had to trust her," Reitman said. He gave the example of the scene where Juno tries to commit suicide by hanging herself with licorice rope. More I will not reveal. "I didn't understand it," Reitman admitted, "but I figured if I loved her screenplay and it was in there, she must have known what she was doing. It gets one of the biggest laughs in the movie."

And...Diablo Cody? That's what everyone calls her?

"Even her parents now," Reitman said.

[MacGuffin]

Telluride Interview: Diablo Cody, Screenwriter of 'Juno'
Source: Cinematical

First-time screenwriter Diablo Cody was the "Cinderella story" of the Telluride Film Festival. A former stripper who got her first break writing a book about her experiences in that line of work, Cody's first script, Juno, made the rounds of Hollywood, got a deal, and then got director Jason Reitman, fresh off his successful feature debut, Thank You for Smoking, hot to make it into a film. Cody took time out of a whirlwind schedule at Telluride to hang out at the gondola station, catch some rays, and talk about her script -- and what it's like being the writer of the film everyone is talking about.

Cinematical: Your film is getting the best buzz I've heard so far at Telluride.

Diablo Cody: It's just amazing. I was surprised, to be invited to this festival. It has a reputation for being a sort of highbrow fest, heavy, a fest for cinephiles. I think people are enjoying it because it's kind of an alternative to the heavier stuff that's being offered. For me to even be here to see all these amazing films is a real privilege. But, yeah, I think that Juno is kind of a lemony palate-cleanser in between all the paralysis and Holocaust stuff.

Cinematical: When I interviewed Jason after Thank You for Smoking, we talked about how he didn't feel comedy was respected enough, especially at film festivals – that comedy can be just as artistic as drama, and he wanted to prove that. It seems Juno is a step in that direction.

DC: I think Jason has a lot to do with that. He's really elevated the material. I know a lot of people feel it was a strong script, which is a great compliment and I'm really happy about that. But to me, Jason just came in and took the script and he really built on the material. Jason and I, we come from very different spaces, I tend to be the one who's, you know, making the joke about the condom making the guy's dick smell like pie. I tend to be a little more ... well, and Jason is a trained filmmaker, and some of his points of reference are more impressive than mine. Well, that's not really what I mean. What I mean is that's good that he and I are different and that we balance each other well.

Cinematical: The dialog in the film was one of its strongest points, a lot of people have been talking about it.

DC: I'm glad that they enjoyed it. My dialog has a tendency to ... it sounds very natural to my ear, and then other people hear it and to them it sounds very stylized. Which I'm glad they do – it makes it appear as if I'm doing something very innovative and creative, when it fact it's just the way I think coming out on the page. And I'm like, "Really? Because to me this just sounds like very realistic dialog."

Cinematical: Can you talk about Ellen Page and how she brought Juno to life?

DC: She is just amazing! Anyone who saw her read for the part unanimously agreed that she just is Juno.

Cinematical: You really can't imagine anyone else playing the part after seeing her in it.

DC: No, you can't. She's the one and only and she's so natural and she's so authentic, to use a word that's kind of trite in the film community. But she is. She just is the character. She's sharp as a tack, right? And one thing I found interesting about this movie is that a lot of the actors had a kinship with their characters that I can't imagine happens in every production. There's a lot of Juno in Ellen Page, there's a lot of Pauly Bleeker in Michael Cera, from what I know of him. He just is a really gentle person. And even Jennifer Garner, who is just this incredibly lovely, graceful person, she has this vulnerability. I think it's one of her best performances.

Cinematical: Maybe it's because she's a mother herself now, and she was able to bring that tenderness, that deep longing to be a mother, into that role.

DC: I'm not a mother myself, so I'm glad she was there to bring that to it. I am a stepmother, and I brought a lot of that angst into the character of Brenda, who Allison Janney plays. I am kind of that no-nonsense, shit-talking Midwestern step-mom, in a lot of ways. So that character was really important to me.

Cinematical: Would that be you at the ultrasound?

DC: Absolutely. I would have kicked that woman's ass. My best friend, when I was in high school, had a baby at 17, which is the incident that inspired a lot of events in the screenplay. And that's one of the things I remembered is her coming back from doctor's visits having been treated like a pariah. And she still, to this day – her son is 10 now – and she still gets people treating her weird, they do the arithmetic and then they treat her weird.

Cinematical: Now this is your first screenplay, but you wrote a book before this.

DC: I wrote a book before this which was this fun, trashy sort of memoir about stripping. That was actually a really cool experience.

Cinematical: Did you do burlesque?

DC: No, I was a hard core stripper, worked at peep shows, did phone sex. Which for me, was actually really transformative and an ultimately positive experience, even though there was a lot of really filthy stuff along the way. And it was after coming off that, that my manager discovered me, lonely and naked in obscurity, and said, why don't you try writing a movie. And that's where Juno came from.

Cinematical: So your manager says write a movie, your memory of your friend was the seed of the idea ...

DC: I don't remember where it came from, actually. My experience with my friend assisted me, but I don't think that's what inspired me directly. Actually, what happened was that one day, I was sitting in my kitchen thinking about writing a screenplay, and every idea I came up with felt like it had been done already, which is something a lot of writers go through. And so I was thinking, what is something that's contemporary, but nobody's really done a movie about it yet. Because I kept hearing about people doing this open adoptions, and instead of it being this cloak-and-dagger experience that it was in the sixties. Suddenly adoptive parents were meeting the birth mother. And I was like, that's gotta be a really weird dynamic, the dynamic between these adoptive parents and these pregnant women. I think I originally intended it to be a lot darker, but I'm just such a ding-a-ling, that it ended up becoming a comedy.

Cinematical: Is there a lot of you in Juno?

DC: Yes, definitely. Absolutely.

Cinematical: So you and Ellen probably got along famously.

DC: I'm very intimated by her. That was the thing, I felt connected to her, I hope the feeling was mutual. But just shooting the shit with her, I was very intimidated. She is needle-sharp. She's really an exceptional talent.

One of the important relationships to me in the movie was between Juno and Leah. Because you meet so many teenage girls these days, they are so mannered, so corked up. When I was a kid, me and my friends, we were just wild, there was such a sense of play. We were running around town stuffing people's mailboxes with Tic-Tacs and harassing the clerk at the gas station, and moving furniture from one lawn to the next. Just being goofy. There wasn't a lot of vanity there.

Cinematical: Do you feel that teenagers today are more self-aware, that there's more of a need to keep that pretense up, to be Paris Hilton?

DC: Absolutely. There's that influence, the Paris factor. But it's also that the economy caters to teens in a way that it didn't even ten years ago.

Cinematical: These teenagers today, their all running around with their rhinestone-studded cell phones, their salon-streaked hair, manicured fingers and pedicured toes ...

DC: Yeah, I didn't have a manicure until I was, like, 25! I can't imagine having one when I was a kid. They don't get to be kids anymore.

Cinematical: But in your story, Juno's not like that. She's pregnant, but she's still very much a kid.

DC: She is a kid! She is, and she knows that she is. I love that she still rides a bike. I love her hoodies. She's like, "I'm ill-equipped." She understands that. Maybe I was trying to recreate a teenage archetype from 1994, when I came of age.

Cinematical: She also operates in this little bubble of utter lack of concern for what other people think, which is also not terribly common in teenagers today.

DC: I just really loved her as a character. And I also really loved Pauly Bleeker, who was inspired by the guys that I knew in high school. The guys that I knew in high school -- when you watch these high school movies coming out today, they're portrayed as horndogs, as wolverines, as these desperate, horny, oily creatures. And the guys I knew weren't like that at all. They were just cowed by me.

Cinematical: I think Pauly's a lot more accurate a portrayal of what teenage boys are really like.

DC: I think so. I hope so. The character of Mark, I have to say, he was a lot more sympathetic as I wrote him. But then Jason (Reitman) came onto it and gave it an edge. He projected quite a bit of male guilt and male angst onto that character, and made him quite a bit more representative of men's failings as husbands and fathers. That was one interesting change I noticed from the script to the final project. That was his direction. He disliked that character, which was interesting. You would think it would be women who would be more wary of that character, but I was the one constantly apologizing for Mark – "he's a really a good guy, he's just scared ..."

Cinematical: You think Jason was irritated by that character?

DC: He was irritated, yes! That character just struck a nerve with him. And I was the one – I am the one still defending Mark. And a lot of Mark's personality were based on my husband, and then, when he saw the film, he was like -- what the fuck? I'm the character the entire audience gasped at when he (edited for spoiler)? And I was like, well, babe, the character kind of ended up changing in the execution.

Cinematical: Can you talk a bit about the process of the production of the film? I know you worked closely with Jason (Reitman) and that you were able to be a lot more involved than screenwriters often are with films.

DC: I was so incredibly lucky, I had such a wonderful experience on this film, and I'm spoiled for life. Writers usually completely get the shaft. They're kept on the perimeter for a reason. That's the way it goes. And I say I've been spoiled. If I ever collaborate with another director again I cannot imagine it will be this inclusive, this positive. Every time I speak with Jason I am amazed that we're the same age – and I mean that in a completely reverant way. He is just a person you meet and you can immediately trust him. Totally non-pretentious. I always say that, you know, I am a much bigger douchebag than Jason. And I come from a middle-class upbringing in Chicago, and I certainly have a much bigger entitlement complex that he does. He's a family man, I admire him in many ways. He was a great influence on me.

Cinematical: So in the process of filming Juno, he let you have input on the set?

DC: Absolutely, that was important to him – he felt that the script was so specific, that the person who wrote it simply had to be involved.

Cinematical: How did he get it?

DC: It really made the rounds, that script was all over Hollywood, I think everyone read it. My manager read it, he wasn't, you know, how do I say this? I love my manager so much ... he was realistic. He was like, you know, there are some people who might like this. And the response was surprising, we sold it pretty quickly. And there was another director on it for a bit (Brad Silberling), who is a wonderful guy and a great director. But that didn't work out, so Jason ended up coming in right away, he'd been watching the project and he came right on. And it was a great decision.

I'm really happy with how the film came out – the film! (laughs) I don't usually talk like that. The CINEMA! No, really. The movie is everything I wanted it to be. There's not a single line of dialog, nothing that sticks in my craw. And usually I'm such a perfectionist about my work, but with this film, I allow myself to love it, because I think of it as Jason's baby.

Cinematical: What are you working on next?

DC: I'm doing this pilot for a Showtime series, Steven Spielberg is exec-producing it, it's a dark comedy, about a woman with multiple personalities. It's called the United States of Tara.

Cinematical: Other movie scripts in the works?

Yeah, I've written a lot since Juno, I'm sitting on a few spec scripts. I have a script over at Groundswell called Time-and-a Half that's a generational, working stiffs kind of comedy. I was sort of inspired by films like Reality Bites, those films that defined "Generation X." I'm a little overripe to be writing about that age, the characters I'm writing about are 23, 24 ... but I'm fascinated by that period in life when you've just gotten out of college.

[diggler]

anyone else see the banner ads for this around the internet? looks like they're basing their whole marketing campaign around michael cera after the success of superbad, but isn't he hardly in the movie?

[modage]

anyone else see the banner ads for this around the internet? looks like they're basing their whole marketing campaign around michael cera after the success of superbad, but isn't he hardly in the movie?

yes!

[Gamblour.]

Fox Searchlight Screenings:

http://rsvp.foxsearchlight.com/RSVPSystem/screenings.php?MoviesId=55

[Gamblour.]

Went to the screening last night. This film is absolutely wonderful. And in a way it addresses and answers problems with contemporary films. You might lump these into 'indie' films, but they aren't always. It's the modern tone and style and treatment of characters and dialogue.

The most striking thing about the film (besides the acting, which is just fantastic) is the dialogue. The dialogue has a distinctive rhythm and slang that doesn't really exist outside of the film, but as I explained to my friend, the playful language lifts the film from it's fairly depressing plotline (a younger version of Knocked Up). The dialogue could easily kill the film, but it works, and I think Jason Reitman and the cast find the humor and the humanity in it and bring it to life.

Ellen Page might polarize some people. She's got this way of acting that lets you know she's acting, but then it's also very compelling. Kinda like Toshiro Mifune. Theatrical, to an extent, but then very human all the same. Michael Cera has developed his empathetic, shy character to perfection, and his most touching moments are in this film. And JK Simmons and Allison Janney as Juno's parents are fucking perfect, they are clever contradictions, embracing mundane existences but also having shrewd honesty and level-headedness that balances the eccentricity of their daughter. But you also kind of see where it came from.

Back to the style of the film, it features the hallmarks that one might see and slap a big 'indie' label on: the dialogue, animated titles (lord, how many movies feature the sort of hand-drawn style seen here, beit in the Royal Tenenbaums, or the posters of Junebug, Me and You and Everyone We Know), awkward high schoolers (christ, Rushmore, Napoleon Dynamite (there's even a character that completely apes Napoleon for about 15 seconds and is never seen again)), the music (is it The Moldy Peaches?), the list goes on.

However, in featuring these elements of modern film, Juno "answers" how these are used. The music doesn't merely line the background of the film with a unique or kitschy sound, it's an integral part of the storytelling. Likewise the dialogue goes beyond the talk of Tarantino or Kevin Smith, who indulge in their own tangents or add verbal flair for the sake of it. Granted, there's nothing too wrong with how they use it, but Juno again offers an alternative to how and why it is used. It's closer to Miller's Crossing than any other film, in this regard, because the language is, or at least feels, completely unique to this universe. It doesn't make feign stabs at poetry, but uses language primarily for comedy. My friend and I noticed that almost every single bit of dialogue is funny, but the film stops the dialogue and takes time for poignant moments, when Juno runs into Vanessa in the mall for instance.

In short, the end had me crying, I belly laughed throughout the whole thing, and I really loved every minute of it.

[w/o horse]

I know very well the kind of experience you had with the film and I hope I have it too.  It sounds like all the ingredients are here.

[Pubrick]

it sounds more like the film somehow miraculously succeeds DESPITE itself. huge chunks of your review could be read as negative, and then you go and cut it huge amounts of slack. i'll have to see it.

i accepted Me And You And Everyone We Know for all its similar qualities. and w/o horse rejected Squid for same, so i don't know why he's hopeful.