Juno is a 2007 Canadian-American comedy-drama film directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody. Ellen Page stars as the title character, an independent-minded teenager confronting an unplanned pregnancy and the subsequent events that put pressures of adult life onto her. Michael Cera, Olivia Thirlby, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman also star. Filming spanned from early February to March 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The film premiered on September 8 at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, receiving a standing ovation.
The film won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and earned three other Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Page. The film's soundtrack, featuring several songs performed by Kimya Dawson in various guises, was the first number one soundtrack since Dreamgirls and 20th Century Fox's first number one soundtrack since Titanic. Juno earned back its initial budget of $6.5 million in twenty days; during the first nineteen of which the film was in limited release.[1] The film has gone on to earn more than 35 times that amount, becoming the highest grossing movie in distributor Fox Searchlight Pictures's history.
Juno received numerous positive reviews from critics, many of whom placed the film on their top ten lists for the year. The film has also received both criticism and praise from members of both the pro-life and pro-choice communities regarding its treatment of abortion.
The movie features several songs performed by Kimya Dawson in her solo, Antsy Pants and The Moldy Peaches (another band group which deserves to be known) guises. This was due to a suggestion by lead actress Ellen Page.
Kimya Dawson (the Moldy Peaches) provided both solo songs and songs from two of her former bands.
The songs were almost entirely self-published by Dawson, who says she wrote nothing specifically for Juno and that all the songs had been performed and recorded before she was contacted to work on the film. Reitman asked her to additionally re-record instrumentals, which included humming over the lyrics of some of her songs. He also contacted composer Mateo Messina, with whom he had previously worked on Thank You for Smoking, to compose the film's incidental score. He gave Messina a collection of Dawson's songs and asked him to create "the sound of the film" through an instrumental score that replicated the recording quality, tone, feel and innocence of her music. Messina decided to implement an "acoustic guitar feel that was jangled and was really loose, like Juno." Experimenting with different guitars, he ended up using "Stella," a second-hand guitar belonging to guitarist Billy Katz that he described as "kind of tinny, not perfectly in tune, but [it] has all kinds of character." Katz was hired to perform acoustic and classical guitar for the movie's score, using "Stella" extensively throughout.
Page also suggested Cat Power's cover of the song "Sea of Love", which Reitman was initially hesitant to include as it had already been featured in the 1989 film Sea of Love; however, he decided that its inclusion would mark a "new take" on the film's cinematic references. He felt that the Sonic Youth cover of "Superstar" defined Juno and Mark's relationship—Juno preferring the classic 1971 version by the Carpenters while Mark preferred Sonic Youth's 1994 cover.[48] "A Well Respected Man" by The Kinks was a song Reitman had associated with a character from another of his screenplays and says it was "heart-breaking" when he decided to include the song as an introduction for Paulie instead, despite feeling it suited the scene perfectly. He found children's songwriter Barry Louis Polisar's "All I Want Is You" after "surfing iTunes for hours on end" using different words and names as search terms and thought that the handmade quality was perfect for the opening titles, which were afterwards made to correspond to the song.
Below the Moldy Peaches performance at the Juno premiere, it is not a very good quality, but we can see the band with their usual concert dresses!
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