Last week I blogged about seeing Lars and the Real Girl instead of my intended movie pick for the weekend, Juno. Maybe I’d been tainted by too much publicity about the preggers teen with the acerbic wit and potty mouth, but I took a pass and was glad I’d spent the evening with Lars and his kooky problem.

Welp, Netflix came through and I finally saw Juno last night. And it was . . . meh. More than meh. I fast-forwarded through the middle ’cause I started really not liking the characters much. Make that Juno. She’d worn out my nerves right around her first trimester.

I tried to keep an open mind. Really. Diablo Cody won an Oscar for best original screenplay, so I was ready for good dialogue and interesting situations.

By about the end of Act 1, I’d had enough of lines that kept slamming me in the face with ‘edgy insightfullness.’ “Look,” Cody seemed to be saying, “Isn’t Juno current and raw and vulnerable all at once? Isn’t she? Isn’t she? She says ‘dude’ and ‘holmes’ while talking about philosophy. She’s a high-school Moliere.” Each line of dialogue felt like a standup bit from Second City. Bada-bing.

Juno goes overtime in trying to milk irony and turn it into a genuine emotional moment. The overly precious soundtrack, Juno’s self-consciously grungy town juxtaposed against the stepfordish Glacial Estates where the adoptive parents live—gah! Enough, I get it. Juno’s Quirky with a capital Q. Now shut UP.

On the other end of the spectrum, I took my kid to see Wall-E over the weekend.

For a movie that has basically no dialogue, I was riveted from start to finish, found myself rooting for Wall-E, a beat up robot left behind to clean up the filth of all humanity, and really really cared about his happy ending. Leave it to Pixar to once again develop a story that you think has no chance of being interesting at all, but manages to be gripping, deep and suitable for all ages. The philosophical implications in Wall-E slam much harder than they do in Juno because they unfold organically. In Wall-E, I don’t have to endure a scene where two characters talk about the gluttony of humans, which is responsible for the apocalypse (instead of nukes or world wars–talk about irony). All I have to do is look at the garbage-strewn landscape. Wall-E, the trash-compacting robot, picks through the detritus for those few treasures that reveal both the best and worst of humanity. So now I’m watching a kid’s movie that makes me think about the nature of creation, our place in the universe, deep-seated love, and hope. And how good the musical Hello, Dolly! was.

And I swear there’s only about 17 lines of dialogue in the whole thing.

The lesson is that wiseassing takes a writer only so far. Much more important is concentrating on moments of genuine emotion, getting out of the way of the character (s), and keeping the dialogue natural. Then the experience feels more like storytelling and less like a night at a Comedy Club.

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.
Kathleen Bolton
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