April 16, 2008

• When little movies happen to too many people

  You all know I love Juno. I can look beyond the “let’s see if I can include the following obscure but hilarious terms” list Diablo Cody seemed to have made when she wrote the script. I can ignore the now almost cliché soundtrack and the fact that now kids have a vague idea of who The Carpenters are because Sonic Youth covered it on the soundtrack. I can even stomach the insipid orange and white striped cover art that has become synonymous with this *~strong willed and sassy teen~*.

  But I can understand the haters, too . . . and I blame overexposure. The marketing for these three films has been like a game of Whack-A-Mole – “this is CHARMING! ENDEARING! HILARIOUS!” – and we’re not exactly the ones holding the mallet.

  Let’s go back to 2004, shall we? A movie featuring a skinny kid with a fro, his chat-addicted brother and his supposed girlfriend, a llama named Tina and a not-even-geeky-kind-of-cool synth soundtrack littered with nonsensical soundbites brought in $44,000,000 in a six-month run in theaters – not bad for a film with a $400k budget.

  

  What started as an independent film picked up by Fox Searchlight turned into merchandise, overuse of the word “gosh” and a stale mispronunciation of “quesadilla” by everyone who either had seen the movie or had sat around the water cooler for long enough to pick up on it. Now, at any novelty store, you can buy a Napoleon action figure, keychain, Vote For Pedro shirt and enough licensed merch to make Jon Heder blush.

  ND worked because of clumsy filmmaking, the shots that lingered a little longer than they should’ve to create an uncomfortable, dorky environment for these characters to live and occasionally thrive in. It looked like a student film but could stand up to the bigger movies that thought less about ambience and more about driving the point of the movie home.

  2006′s Little Miss Sunshine, a dark comedy with a sunshiney ending, featured a truly dysfunctional household but was marketed as “a funny look at families just like yours!” Dwayne, the occasionally mute Paul Dano’s character, spoke the quaint “Do what you love; fuck everything else,” a phrase that went from a gasping, desperate revelation to being relegated to AIM profiles.

  

  Abigail Breslin’s Academy Award nomination only made the hype worse; it was almost a relief when she didn’t win and bring even more pressure to a movie that ultimately was not meant to be shown on such a huge scale.

  So now we have Juno, a movie that brought the phrases “Mott The Hoople” and “honest to blog” into the vocabulary of every person under the age of 20 who can download media. The movie itself started out small enough (buzz online as they filmed was that Arrested Development alums  Jason Bateman and Michael Cera were together again, not about the actual plot) and spread because of word of mouth and a silly, loquacious trailer and subsequent ad campaign.

  

  As was the case with Little Miss Sunshine, the movie was ambitious without seeming capable of withstanding so much press and hype; were it to be the smaller, less universally accessible movie I wish it would’ve been, nobody would be whistling Anyone Else But You or searching for hamburger phones online.

  And, call me a scenester, but I liked it better when nobody knew about these movies. I saw all three in the theaters at least twice, and although the first screenings were always more exciting because they were new! shiny! anticipated, the second usually proved to be more sociologically interesting – in the case of Napoleon, I saw dorks laughing with Napoleon the first time and the “cool kids” laughing at him the second time. The third screening, two weeks later, left me surrounded with parents wanted to be in on the joke.

  But there are still Fox Searchlight movies not everyone has seen, and I’m thrilled because of it. I can’t find a pen that plays Once’s “Falling Slowly” when I click it (thank goodness), I doubt it’s easy to find a History Boys official school uniform and people have said “gesundheit” when I talk about L’Auberge Espagnole . . . and it’s comforting to know that something that would inevitably end up finishing out a dollar theater run at a paltry per-theater amount will never reach such a large audience.
  
  If you’re not completely bonkers about Juno/ND/LMS, I get it – but before you trash them, remember that not everything is meant for mass consumption and that hits can happen unexpectedly.

  • 2:12 pm
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