The first clue that you may in fact be watching a quirky indie comedy arrives when Rainn Wilson appears in the opening scene as a convenience store clerk.
Second clue: As the main character, a 16-year-old girl, ponders her immediate future while holding a positive pregnancy test, he says: “That ain’t no Etch-a-Sketch. This is one doodle that can’t be un-did, homeskillet!”
Cha-ching! Yes, Juno is undeniably and unabashedly one of those kinds of movies, where every character is a Character and every line of dialogue comes with its own set of quotation marks. Do even the wittiest of clerks ever have the mental fortitude to say things like, “You better pay for that pee-stick when you’re done with it. Don’t think it’s yours just because you marked it with your urine!” Perhaps if he’s an aspiring screenwriter, because only screenwriters think that mortal humans converse this way: quirkily.
But despite the hollow clunk of its first scene—and the Wes Andersonian notes throughout—Juno manages to overcome its genre’s clichés to become a genuinely touching comedy about teen pregnancy. And the reason why is very clear: Ellen Page makes you believe that a teenager can have the mouth of a jaded 40-year-old.
Her character, Juno, is the sort of girl who wraps herself in such a thick shield of sarcasm that she’s barely phased by her predicament: impregnated by her best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) after a what-the-heck incident of intercourse. Perturbed, yes, but not quite as terrified as you might expect a young woman to be in such a situation. Instead, she uses this opportunity to crack wise about it.
Apologizing to her parents: “And if it is any consolation, I have heartburn that is radiating in my knee caps.”
Advising a potential adopter of her unborn baby: “You should’ve gone to China, you know, ’cause I hear they give away babies like free iPods. You know, they pretty much just put them in those T-shirt guns and shoot them out at sporting events.”
Announcing that she has broken her water: “Thundercats are go!”
By almost any standard of human discourse, this is awfully precious dialogue. But Page musters enough humanity for her character that it’s easy to overlook her studiously written exclamations; she is at once withering and plaintive, someone covering for the fact that she’s in over her head. Marching forward belly first, Juno compensates for her suddenly-much-more difficult life by flaunting her “mistake”—she’s dealing with it, so why won’t you? In an era of increasingly insipid movie characters (especially teenagers), it’s hard not to root for one who’s smart, witty, and brave—though you may occasionally wish the script would let her take a breather from casting impeccable barbs.
With but one movie script to her credit, Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody is already among our most celebrated scribes. That may have more to do with her well-publicized background (what media outlet can resist a stripper-turned-writer story?) than her writing skills, but Juno is quickly earning her a following not unlike Buffy’s Joss Whedon. In fact, her attempts at coining catchphrases are downright Whedonesque, though not nearly as clever. “Honest to blog!” Juno’s best friend exclaims, instantaneously dating the movie for all eternity. And will the term “wizard” ever really become the new “rad”? We can only hope not.
Juno doesn’t encounter many potholes in her journey. Her supportive parents barely bat an eye at the news of her pregnancy. She quickly finds a young, wealthy couple (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) to adopt her baby through one scan of the ads in the Penny Saver; they turn out to be not quite perfect, but this causes only momentary disarray. As her partner in ill-advised sex, Cera more or less portrays the same likable, shy boy he’s been playing since Arrested Development, only with fewer lines. He seems agreeable to whatever. Yes, everybody’s issues do get resolved, just as you expected them to.
This qualifies Juno as a feel-good movie, though the main character’s triumph doesn’t seem particularly hard-fought. Things are just a bit too neat and orderly for a movie that is being prized for its sense of reality. Nevertheless, Ellen Page creates a character you wish you knew, someone who’s always funny, always interesting, and who could use some help. It’s a performance that’s hard to resist, in a movie that serves mostly as a pleasant backdrop for an interesting new actress.
Rental Hygiene
Lady Chatterley
D.H. Lawrence’s novel has been unlucky in its relationships with the screen. Given the book’s once-scandalous sexual explicitness, filmmakers have been forced to short the fleshier aspects (a chaste-seeming 1955 French version), or, have gone wild with them (an overheated 1981 version starring Sylvia “Emmanuelle” Kristal). Pascale Ferran’s recent film version isn’t perfect, but it comes closest to making the novel a story that successfully addresses heart, head, and groin.
The story is familiar even though Ferran adapted Lawrence’s second, penultimate version of the novel, a kinder and more tender take. With her husband Clifford (Hippolyte Giradot) paralyzed by a war wound, Constance Chatterley (Marina Hands) drifts around their grand rural manor, disconnected from her life. The inadvertent sight of the estate’s gamekeeper, Parkin (Jean-Louis Coullo’ch), bathing stripped to the waist stirs Lady Chatterley out of her funk. Tentatively, the lady and the servant bridge the class divide for a fling that turns into something deeper and more sustaining for both.
What’s most scandalous here is the literary languor with which Ferran lavishes her subject; Lady Chatterley’s nearly three-hour run-time seems almost indulgent in an era where one starts clocking the time on the DVD player if a film runs over 80 minutes. But the deliberate pace allows Ferran to fully explore the hesitant unfolding of Constance and Parkin’s relationship, which must navigate the usual human insecurities and vulnerabilities as well as social issues, and how it changes their lives. It also helps that Hands and Coullo’ch are both fairly ordinary-looking, even ungainly at times; through the director’s watchful lens, their coming together bears the earmarks of effort, risk, and need, rather than mere scripting and choreography.
Labels: Interesting, odd, Sex.
One in five adults in New York are putting themselves at risk of HIV by having sex with multiple partners or using needles to inject drugs, a study by the US Health Department stated.
Around 92 per cent of them do not think they are at risk, the study found.
The survey also found that out of the people with multiple sex partners, almost 60 per cent put themselves at risk by not always using condoms.
Compared to the national data, sexual risk-taking appears to be more common among New York City adults, but injection drug use appears to be roughly the same.
The findings highlight common misperceptions about HIV and underscore the importance of education and routine HIV testing.
"Far too many people are in danger of contracting HIV through risky behaviour," Dr Thomas R Frieden, Health Commissioner for New York City, said.
"Reducing the number of sex partners and protecting yourself and your partners by consistently using condoms will help you stay safe. We should all know our HIV status, regardless of whether we think we're at risk and health care providers should offer this test to their patients," he said.
The study, whose lead author is Trang Nguyen, is the first in a US to use a citywide survey of blood samples to estimate HIV prevalence.
The findings suggest that approximately 1.4 per cent of New York City adults are infected with HIV, about the same proportion that past studies have obtained by pooling case reports from hospitals, clinics and doctors' offices. (MORE)
The rate of those infected by HIV in New York City is nearly four times the national rate (0.37 per cent) and is a likely reflection of a larger population of ethnic minorities and men who have sex with men, the study found.
Keeping with past surveys, the new study found an especially large HIV burden among men who have sex with other men. Their infection rate was 14 per cent, approximately 38 times the citywide average.
Black and Hispanic New Yorkers have long been disproportionately affected by the HIV epidemic. Indeed, this survey showed that rates of HIV are nearly six times higher among black New Yorkers than white New Yorkers (3.3 versus 0.6 per cent), a trend that has been documented through other surveillance methods since the early 1980s.
The HIV rate among Hispanic New Yorkers (1.3 per cent) was more than twice that of whites. While HIV infection due to injection drug use has declined in New York City since the 1990s, the new study suggests the disease is still common among needle users, 21 per cent of whom have tested positive for HIV.
"If you are using drugs, get help to stop," added Frieden. "But protect yourself until you stop by not sharing equipment."
To reduce risky sexual behaviour, the Health Department is planning an educational campaign targeting men who have sex with men. The agency also distributes more than three million branded NYC condoms each month.
To reduce transmission among drug users, the US Health Department sponsors needle-exchange programmes in several boroughs, helps health care providers get their patients off drugs, and contracts with service organisations to provide treatment for addiction.
Twins who were separated at birth got married without realizing they were brother and sister, a lawmaker said, urging more information be provided on birth certificates for adopted children.
A court annulled the British couple's union after they discovered their true relationship, Lord David Alton said.
"Everyone has a right to knowledge about their lineage, genealogy and identity. And if they don't, then it will lead to cases of incest," Alton told The Associated Press during a telephone interview Friday.
Alton first revealed details of the unusual case last month during a five-hour debate about a bill that would change regulations about human embryology.
"I was recently involved in a conversation with a High Court judge who was telling me of a case he had dealt with," Alton said according to a transcript of the Dec. 10 debate. "It involved the normal birth of twins who were separated at birth and adopted by separate parents.
"They were never told that they were twins. They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation."
Alton gave no additional details and would not reveal the name of the judge who told him about the case.
The High Court's Family Division declined to discuss or confirm Alton's account about the twins.
Alton, an independent legislator who works at Liverpool's John Moores University, said the siblings' inadvertent marriage raises the wider issue of the importance of strengthening the rights of children to know the identities of their biological parents, including kids who were born through in vitro fertilization.
Under British law, only a mother has to be named on a birth certificate. Such certificates also are not required to identify births that result from IVF or to identify the sperm donor.
In addition, British law does not require parents to ever tell children that they were the result of donated sperm.
Alton believes this should be changed.
Alton said he favors an amendment to the Human Fertility and Embryology bill - which is still being debated in the House of Lords - that would require birth certificates of children born from donated sperm to say that and to identify the genetic father.
Referring to the twins' case, he said: "If you start trying to conceal someone's identity, sooner or later the truth will come out. And if you don't know you are biologically related to someone, you may become attracted to them and tragedies like this may occur."
Labels: Interesting, odd
Two men wheeled a dead man through the streets in an office chair to a check-cashing store and tried to cash his Social Security check before being arrested on fraud charges, police said.
David J. Dalaia and James O'Hare pushed Virgilio Cintron's body from the Manhattan apartment that O'Hare and Cintron shared to Pay-O-Matic, about a block away, spokesman Paul Browne said witnesses told police.
"The witnesses saw the two pushing the chair with Cintron flopping from side to side and the two individuals propping him up and keeping him from flopping from side to side," Browne said.
The men left Cintron's body outside the store, went inside and tried to cash his $355 check, Browne said. The store's clerk, who knew Cintron, asked the men where he was, and O'Hare told the clerk they would go and get him, Browne said.
A police detective who was having lunch at a restaurant next to the check-cashing store noticed a crowd forming around Cintron's body, and "it's immediately apparent to him that Cintron is dead," Browne said.
The detective called uniformed New York Police Department officers at a nearby precinct. Emergency medical technicians arrived as O'Hare and Dalaia were preparing to wheel Cintron's body into the check-cashing store, Browne said. Police arrested Dalaia and O'Hare there, he said.
Cintron's body was taken to a hospital morgue. The medical examiner's office told police it appeared Cintron, 66, had died of natural causes within the previous 24 hours, Browne said.
"He was deceased in the apartment when he was removed by these two," Browne said.
Dalaia and O'Hare, both 65, were being held by police and faced check fraud charges, Browne said.
A call to a telephone number listed for Cintron at the apartment he shared with O'Hare went unanswered Tuesday evening. Police said they didn't have an address for Dalaia or attorney information for him or O'Hare.
Labels: Interesting, News, Odd.
