I like Diablo Cody. I thought Juno was a perfectly fine and fun little movie, though one that deserved neither the massive acclaim or the massive backlash it received. (I did like the Quotey parody as well.) And I thought Jennifer's Body was pretty good too. I suspect a lot of the grief she receives is pure jealousy from people whose zingers end up on Twitter rather than in hundreds of movie theaters. In Young Adult, the worst of Cody's excesses are gone, and she almost gets an ending right.
We open with what seems to be a dream—a successful novelist in the big city! Except the city is Minneapolis, and the novelist—Mavis (Charlize Theron) is really just ghosting a dying Gossip Girl/Sweet Valley High*-like YA series under a house name. She's messed up. Her days are an endless parade of chugging diet Coke and watching the Kardashians, her nights a fugue of alcohol and OkCupid dates that end in boring sex. Then she finds out that her old high school boyfriend just had a child, and she's inexplicably been invited to the girl's hippie-dippy "naming ceremony" she decides to go. She's convinced it means something, so it's a roadtrip back to tiny Mercury, MN, where the 90s never ended. Everyone still wears Breeders and Pixies t-shirts anyway. Also, Teenage Fanclub should be very happy to get a few bucks, as this song is referenced a lot:
There Mavis drinks a lot and meets a former "hate crime kid" and now grown-up crippled nerd Matt. As it turns out, Patton Oswald can act. I mean, he's an actor. He does things with his body and face. He's not just Funny Little Fat Man #785709. Theron can too, of course, and she does. He look varies from one step above Monster to super-sexy, depending on what the character is up to, and she's utterly vile and narcissistic.
The theme is that of a girl who thinks she made good, but who really is an alcoholic wreck and utterly alone. Mavis really has no idea why her ex won't leave his new wife—who isn't super sexy, but who is plenty cute and a drummer in a mommy band called Nipple Confusion—or his newborn child. She avoids her own parents, and drinks the Matt's homemade bourbon to excess. Naturally, there's a giant alcohol-fueled conflict at the naming ceremony and she storms off, humiliated in front of the whole dumpy little chain-bar and strip-mall town**, and of course she and Matt have sad drunk sex.
And then a miracle happens. There's no intervention. No pouring of the last bottle of bourbon down the drain, no staring off into the sky or ending up on a therapist's couch. Mavis actually gets a measure of validation from a foolish little townie who doesn't know any better, and that's enough. Nobody changes, nothing is learned, there is no moral instruction, it's all just a great big howling
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FFFFFFFFFF UUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Well, not quite howling. That's the problem, really. It's more of a defiant raspberry, and just pretty good. It's hard to resist a century of narrative hegemony, but Cody managed it, and without much in the way of an alternative model. Though it's a Jason Reitman film, Cody is all over it—one can tell from the clever, subtle, costuming and art direction. As one of the characters says, everyone in Mercury is "fat and dumb." Hollywood generally resists such things, but in this movie, it happens. Also, there is a credit line for "Assistant to Ms. Cody", which suggests that she was on set at least some of the time. Reitman is developing a good sense of the visual—we often see things from an invisible Matt's POV so we can share in his judgment and his lust, and the opening credit sequence is great.
Young Adult is a good movie about a bad person. Watch it.
PS: I came home and turned on the TV. Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage is on. Amazingly, it shares the same exact theme as Young Adult, except that the people in this little town really are so fat and dumb that they think Thomas is cool and great!
*Cody famously signed on to write the script for the Sweet Valley High film.
**No surprise here, many scenes were shot on Long Island.
We open with what seems to be a dream—a successful novelist in the big city! Except the city is Minneapolis, and the novelist—Mavis (Charlize Theron) is really just ghosting a dying Gossip Girl/Sweet Valley High*-like YA series under a house name. She's messed up. Her days are an endless parade of chugging diet Coke and watching the Kardashians, her nights a fugue of alcohol and OkCupid dates that end in boring sex. Then she finds out that her old high school boyfriend just had a child, and she's inexplicably been invited to the girl's hippie-dippy "naming ceremony" she decides to go. She's convinced it means something, so it's a roadtrip back to tiny Mercury, MN, where the 90s never ended. Everyone still wears Breeders and Pixies t-shirts anyway. Also, Teenage Fanclub should be very happy to get a few bucks, as this song is referenced a lot:
There Mavis drinks a lot and meets a former "hate crime kid" and now grown-up crippled nerd Matt. As it turns out, Patton Oswald can act. I mean, he's an actor. He does things with his body and face. He's not just Funny Little Fat Man #785709. Theron can too, of course, and she does. He look varies from one step above Monster to super-sexy, depending on what the character is up to, and she's utterly vile and narcissistic.
The theme is that of a girl who thinks she made good, but who really is an alcoholic wreck and utterly alone. Mavis really has no idea why her ex won't leave his new wife—who isn't super sexy, but who is plenty cute and a drummer in a mommy band called Nipple Confusion—or his newborn child. She avoids her own parents, and drinks the Matt's homemade bourbon to excess. Naturally, there's a giant alcohol-fueled conflict at the naming ceremony and she storms off, humiliated in front of the whole dumpy little chain-bar and strip-mall town**, and of course she and Matt have sad drunk sex.
And then a miracle happens. There's no intervention. No pouring of the last bottle of bourbon down the drain, no staring off into the sky or ending up on a therapist's couch. Mavis actually gets a measure of validation from a foolish little townie who doesn't know any better, and that's enough. Nobody changes, nothing is learned, there is no moral instruction, it's all just a great big howling
FFFFFFFFFF UUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Well, not quite howling. That's the problem, really. It's more of a defiant raspberry, and just pretty good. It's hard to resist a century of narrative hegemony, but Cody managed it, and without much in the way of an alternative model. Though it's a Jason Reitman film, Cody is all over it—one can tell from the clever, subtle, costuming and art direction. As one of the characters says, everyone in Mercury is "fat and dumb." Hollywood generally resists such things, but in this movie, it happens. Also, there is a credit line for "Assistant to Ms. Cody", which suggests that she was on set at least some of the time. Reitman is developing a good sense of the visual—we often see things from an invisible Matt's POV so we can share in his judgment and his lust, and the opening credit sequence is great.
Young Adult is a good movie about a bad person. Watch it.
PS: I came home and turned on the TV. Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage is on. Amazingly, it shares the same exact theme as Young Adult, except that the people in this little town really are so fat and dumb that they think Thomas is cool and great!
*Cody famously signed on to write the script for the Sweet Valley High film.
**No surprise here, many scenes were shot on Long Island.