"He's basically Ed Wood, but with an inexhaustible supply of money."

--"Moodie" of the British Horror Films Forum on George Lucas.

Yes, it's Oscar season, apparently, and this year marks the first time (I think) that I've ever seen all five Best Picture nominees in the year of their eligibility. I'm happy about that, as this has been a really decent year for that sort of thing, with one glaring exception that I mentioned earlier. I'm behind There Will Be Blood, although I'll only get irritated if Atonement wins.

Michael Clayton (2007): Tony Gilroy's moody 70s-homage thriller played for a day at the Michigan Theater, and as I missed it earlier at Showcase, I decided to catch it before I left. Michael Clayton (George Clooney) wokrs as a fixer for a wealthy and influential New York law firm on the verge of merging with a London concern and going global. His friend Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), the firm's most lethal and feared counsel, flips out and strips naked during a deposition in a class-action lawsuit against one of the firm's clients, a sleazy Archer Daniels Midland simulacrum called UNorth (their TV commercials are priceless bits of satire on the fim's part). Yes, Arthur's having a crisis of conscience, and the firm's head honcho (Sydney Pollack) sends Clayton to Wisconsin to manage the meltdown. Arthur's actions and the apearance of a damning memo from UNorth's scientific staff spark rebellious impulses in Clayton (once an idealistic lawyer working in the D.A.'s office), which grow after ambitious UNorth executive Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) tries to interfere with his search for the truth. I really enjoyed this; I hadn't seen a good meat-and-potatoes flick like this in a while, and while it doesn't have the linguistic, visual, or thematic fireworks of fellow Best Picture Oscar nominees There Will Be Blood or No Country For Old Men, it's got an appeal all its own, and I don't remember applause breaking out at a crucial scene during the other two movies. The idealist-lawyer-against-the-system story is one of the most dependable--and hackneyed--storylines in American movies and television, and it's a credit to Gilroy and the actors that they manage to make the story seem fresh and inspired (especially with its relatively downbeat ending).

Juno (2007): Will and Ariel Durant, the longtime eminences grises (usage?) of middlebrow "you-can-own-the-entire-set" history, once wrote of a British playwright (I think it was Sheridan) that his "wit dulled by excess." Something much the same could be said for Juno. Sixteen-year-old Juno McGuff (Ellen Page)--a confused, hyper-articulate, but still very likeable mess, much like the movie itself--gets pregnant by off-and-on boyfriend Paul Bleeker (the great Michael Cera of Arrested Development) and, after a weird set of happenstances, decides to carry the baby to term instead of aborting it, and searches for a couple looking to adopt. She finds Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark (the great Jason Bateman of Arrested Development--I wish there had been more of a pattern there), a cartoonish pair of yuppies, advertising in the Penny Saver and quickly strikes up a business relationship with them as a surrogate mother. Juno herself is very nearly unbelievable, were it not for the fact that she reminds me very strongly of an old friend of mine (who actually had a similar origin to her unusual name from Greco-Roman mythology).  First-time screenwriter Diablo Cody (who's also one of the only reasons to read Entertainment Weekly these days) trowels on the quirkiness to the extent that the first half of the movie, at least, feels a lot like a live-action cartoon. I might have taken more umbrage at the suffocating hip of Juno's own dialogue if it hadn't been so damn funny. It's not just Juno--her family and friends are similarly sarcastically gifted, with only Mark and Vanessa left out (for the most part). The latter's well-to-do suburban uniformity gets run through the satirical wringer with the same daring and originality with which it's been done in other movies over the past thirty or forty years. Fortunately, by the time the movie rolls into the second half, the power of the story and the overall excellence of the acting (I've thought of Bateman and Cera as Michael and George Michael Bluth for so long that their prowess in dramatic scenes is genuinely revelatory) break throught he dialogue and twee soundtrack (it's hard to miss the Wes Anderson vibe in the latter, what with all the mid-60s Kinks and post-Cale Velvet Underground--it really ought to be the other way round, although it goes without saying that Juno beats the pants off Royal Tenenbaums). Page has been hailed for her winning performance, and rightly so, but the real surprise for me was Garner--I was never into Alias, and haven't seen her in much of anything else besides Pearl Harbor, but she was really good in Juno as a character who's very nearly a yuppie caricature. To be sure, it's almost impossible not to like a movie in which two characters argue over whether Herschell Gordon Lewis or Dario Argento was the greater horror director (and the answer is Argento, for fuck's sake)*. Speaking of horror, watch for Ginger Snaps' marvelous Emily Perkins as the abortion clinic receptionist. In the end, Juno's a lot like musician Kimya Dawson, late of the Moldy Peaches, many of whose songs appear in the film. I heard her at the Blind Pig several years ago out of curiosity. The actual music didn't rock my world, to be honest, but the warmth and sincerity of the show itself melted my heart, to the extent that I gave her a huge hug after she hand-stenciled a T-shirt for me (so that I could send it to my aforementioned Juno-reminiscent friend, strangely enough). In the end, that's what I wanted to give Juno--a hug (the final scene really is terribly sweet).

*I noticed, however, that Michael Reeves, Larry Cohen, Pete Walker, and George Romero all went unmentioned.