if you’re bored — as i sometimes get, despite how cool and constantly fun-filled my life must seem if you read this regularly — you should take some time to check out this this funny column written by a friend of ours. no, you know what, even if you are never bored, you should make time to check it out. i know it’s on suicide girls, so some of you with more big-brother-ish site blockage at work may not be able to, but rest assured that if you do, there’s nothing naughty to get you in trouble on his page. well worth it.

oh, and also we did a rare thing and went out to a weeknight movie this week…

juno – 4 stars

this is one of those movies that looks so cool — not necessarily great or profound, just really cool — you want it to be pure goodness. sadly, it’s not quite that, but at the end of the day, it’s fully worth seeing. if you were interested in seeing, you definitely should, even if most of what follows is a litany of things that could have been slightly better and pushed it from really good to really great.

the good parts are that it’s clever, the main character is adorable and funny, all the supporting characters are really good, and you want everything to work out for everyone in the movie.

the major flaw, i thought, was the choice of focus. maybe it’s just me, but when you have michael cera in a movie, you damn well better use him. he’s too good to be wasted. but instead of giving a fair share of screen time to his relationship with juno, as the source of the pregnancy and her maybe/sorta boyfriend, i think they made a mis-step by instead putting so much focus on the adoptive father played by jason bateman. not that he’s any slouch either, and i did like that dynamic, but it seemed almost like the movie got distracted from itself by leaving the teen romance card mostly off the table. heck, you could just extend the movie, which wasn’t that long, by 15 minutes and build up that relationship a little more without losing any of the existing scenes. you’d get a much stronger, fuller story.

and of course, i’m nitpicking now, but the same goes for the father, played by the guy who fucking ruled as both j jonah jameson in spider man and the tobacco executive in thank you for smoking. he’s a scene-stealer, a home run hitter, why not put him in the game more?

and i agree with the LA times review i read as well, that occasionally the writing is just so whip-smart, it almost sounds like the actors are having a hard time spitting it out. no human can be that pithy that often, you know? normally i’m a sucker for that kind of super-humanly clever dialogue (i really like kevin smith movies AND watched studio 60 through to the finish), but there were a few times it felt awkward instead of witty.

in the end though, i really did enjoy it. ellen page will be one to watch. not a single person in the movie did a bad job. and even through the obvious flaws, it was still a success. jason reitman’s looking like a director to keep an eye on, and i certainly plan to.