News of the Day -- Friday, March 21

+ Tons of reports coming in this morning on last night's Paley Fest panel discussion with the cast of "Buffy." This one from "The Futon Critic" seemed the most comprehensive. From everything I've read, I think someone may need to decaffeinate Nicholas Brendon. I'm just sayin'...

+ How's this for a Magic Kingdom of Comedy? Tina Fey has just been cast in Ricky Gervais' directorial debut "This Side of Truth." As if that weren't enough to make me wag my tail in glee, the film also stars Christopher Guest, Jeffrey Tambor AND John Hodgman. My insides have turned to bliss.

+ If you haven't seen it yet, check out this parody of "Juno" penned by "Daily Show" scribe Rob Kutner, starring J.K. Simmons and directed by my friend Stephen Levinson:



And if you're suddenly thinking to yourself, wow, Liz's friends do some fine comedy work, you should check out Cap'n Wacky's Boatload of Fun humor site, which updates every Friday, and The City Desk, an ingenious site chronicling a slightly messed-up fictional city. Think "Hudsucker Proxy" meets Garrison Keillor meets the deadest of deadpan.

"Juno" stirs the pot.

Last week, Entertainment Weekly, also known as the Magical Conduit Through Which Pictures of Johnny Depp Enter My Home, published a story on the vast and unexpected popularity of the movie, “Juno.” The story included the following paragraph:

“After years of being served mostly bland good girls and ciphers — from Molly Ringwald in the '80s to Alicia Silverstone in the '90s to Lindsay Lohan in the '00s — teenage girls are clearly starving for a female antihero, as are their mothers, fathers, older sisters, and even some of their brothers. In Juno, the story of a pint-size badass who also happens to be a romantic idealist, Hollywood has finally delivered. "It's a teenage female lead we've never seen before,'' says (star Ellen) Page. "She dresses like she wants, says what she wants, and doesn't apologize for it....Girls haven't had that sort of character before. We don't have our Catcher in the Rye." In what may be the ultimate sign of success, there's even a cranky backlash bubbling up, much of it from adults who question whether teenage girls are really all that clever.

This can’t be true, I thought. There must be some smart, funny, independent female role models in the movies somewhere. Right? And then I sat and thought about it. And thought about it some more. And then I had a cookie and thought about whether I should have milk with it. (I decided no. It’s a lactose thing.) And then I went back to thinking about the “Juno” thing. And you know what? I really couldn’t think of a comparable character, someone who lit up the cinemaplex simply by walking to the beat of her own indie drummer.

Tons of smart rebels popped into my head from television. There was Buffy and Willow. There was “Veronica Mars,” and Rory on “Gilmore Girls” and maybe Claire Bennet from “Heroes,” although she loses a little luster in the sparkling wit department. And even if there isn’t a hoard of teenage characters, there’s still been a sizable group of adult women portrayed as smart, funny and independent-minded on shows as diverse as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Firefly” and “30 Rock.” In short, there seems to be a relative haven for smart, badass women on TV.

But why so few brilliant, snarky female teens in the movies? Could it be as terrible as the last line of that paragraph suggests: adults…question whether teenage girls are really all that clever. That line makes me enormously sad especially when I consider how my friends and I spent so much of our youth trying to be hyperliterate, attempting to drop bon mots with the verbal alacrity of Noel Coward...if, you know, he’d been more of a teenage girl.

The conspiracy-minded part of me – the part that knows The Purina Man is keeping the basset hounds down at Westminster – believes that maybe Hollywood has denied us independent minded teenage girls for the simple fact that if we let young girls know it’s okay to think for themselves they won’t buy the jeans or the Hannah Montana CDs or the breast implants we want them to buy. They might realize the dangerous truth that real self-worth comes from thinking for yourself. Put too many Junos in the flock, and these sheep might just wander.

And personally, thinking for myself as a woman and all, how brilliantly awesome would that be?

Review: Juno

Last night I went to a special screening of the new film, "Juno," which included a Q&A session with screenwriter Diablo Cody and was kind of like getting the DVD extras before the DVD actually comes out -- which is to say, it was great.

"Juno" is the first screenplay written by Cody, who started out blogging about her life as a stripper. She eventually wrote a book about her experiences and soon after that was invited to write the script that became "Juno."

Seeing this movie, you would not know this is the work of a first-time screenwriter except for the fact that the work has the integrity of a newcomer. This is a very funny and ultimately very touching film about Juno, a 16 year old girl who gets pregnant, as her stepmother says, for the true and mundane reason that sometimes "kids get bored and they have intercourse," and decides to give the baby up for adoption to a seemingly perfect couple played by Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman. The emotional core of the film, Cody claimed, comes from director Jason Reitman. "I don't like message movies," Cody said. "I don't like movies where anything touching or moving happens. I like 'Anchorman' so that should tell you something."

I think she's selling herself way short there. The complexity of these characters and the situations they're in cannot help but generate emotion, from Garner's character who's desperate to be a mother to Bateman's character who's kind of a creep (sorta, maybe) to Juno who tries to be tough but who wants everything to be right so badly that it hurts to the father of the baby, played by Michael Cera, who just seems confused but good-hearted about the whole thing. This is a complicated movie with heart and charm and great jokes including my favorite, a description of the Roosevelts -- "not Ted," Juno says, "but Franklin, the hot one with polio."

The acting is uniformly outstanding. Ellen Page, who you may remember from a disturbingly inverted Red Riding Hood tale called "Hard Candy," plays Juno as a girl who is blisteringly smart about everything except how the world really works. Allison Janney as Juno's stepmother steals every scene she's in and I'm begging the powers that be to give her that Oscar nomination right now. Jennifer Garner is wonderful, too, as a woman who wants a baby so badly she becomes blind to everything else around her. And Michael Cera puts in another fine performance as a good kid in a tough situation. Jason Bateman does a fascinating turn, too, as a guy not yet ready to grow up. Despite the things he does, Bateman plays his character in such a way that you just can't hate him. As Cody said, "I want (him) to be happy, too, even though he's creepy."

As an aside, it was great to see "Arrested Development" co-stars Cera and Bateman in a movie together even though they never share the screen. As an "Arrested Development" fan herself, Cody said, "If I had known they were going to be in the film together, I would have written nine scenes with them together and totally fucked up the movie." It might actually have been worth it.

If you have a chance to see this film, do it. Now. Please.