Juno

**1/2 – This is one of those movies that tries way too hard too seem cool. There are few things sadder than that in my opinion. Perhaps there was a time when liking 70s slasher pics and The Stooges was thought of as being way outside the box and rebellious, but now it has become normal for the people who are slightly to the left of actual normal. Trying to pawn that off as being super weird and quirky – in the context of this movie anyway – is really rather off-putting. And I blame that on the writing, because I thought the performances were pretty darn good for the most part, especially that of the always reliable J.K. Simmons as the father. The gist of this movie is that a ‘weird’ girl gets pregnant and searches for a family to adopt the kid - ending up choosing Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner – and then has all sorts of shenanigans in the meantime. I guess not so much shenanigans as goings-on. There is a fair amount of humor in it, mainly provided by peripheral characters like Simmons’ and a few others. The attempts at humor from the lead character generally annoyed more than anything as it smacked of 16-year-old-trying-to-sound-cool – which, in fairness, it actually was. In any event, this film was decent but not as good as most of the reviews of it seemed to indicate.