While we were toughing out the cold and wind in Estes Park, we discovered the little movie theater, and on recommendation from Dennis Praeger and the fact that it was one of the top 10 picks of the movie editor at the National Catholic Register, we decided to go see Juno. Were we in for a shock! Crass hardly describes the movie–it was downright vulgar. And witty humor that degrades sex is simply not funny. Yes, the pregnant teenager kept her baby and put the baby up for adoption, but beyond that, the movie was a bust. I hope it was an exaggeration of how things are in high schools across the nation. I hope beyond hope that girls are not so obsessed with sex and don’t speak of it in such crude terms. I hope that parents exert their authority and don’t grant so much freedom to their teens that they never know where they are. I hope that a father would not allow the boy with whom his daughter got pregnant to climb into bed with her at the hospital after she has delivered the baby and given it up. I hope that married couples respect themselves and their sexuality enough not to degrade it with crass language. And I wonder why the filmmakers had to be so brazen as to portray the teenager giving herself a pregnancy test on the toilet. Do we really need to see all this? Are we so desperate for a nod from Hollywood that we will take the vulgarity and degradation in order to squeeze out a “pro-life” message?
In the end, the baby goes to a single mom and the teenager says that it just isn’t everybodys’ way to fall in love before they reproduce themselves. She never learns from the experience. This is definitely not a movie for teens who believe that sex is holy and to be saved for marriage. There is too much that is suggestive and there are no role models to be found–not in the teens (except for the one picketing the abortuary who is portrayed as a kind of nerd), not in the teachers, not in the parents. If your teens still have an innocent bone in their body, they won’t after seeing Juno. Teens who are already absorbed in this crude subculture might find in Juno an example of protecting the life she and the boy casually conceived, but she is a poor role model at best. Thumbs down!
