"Juno" Director Says: Don't Judge the Palins

Mac MacGuff: And this, of course, is Juno.
Mark Loring: Like the city in Alaska?
Juno MacGuff: No.

-- from "Juno," directed by Jason Reitman

Honest to Blog. What were the odds that commie-leftie-Obama-loving Hollywood would create the real-life template for the shenanigans playing out at the Republican Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota?

We're talking about the Sarah Palin drama about to come whirling down into the Xcel Energy Center like some hurricane blown up from the south. Except that this hurricane is coming down from the north, west of Juneau, Alaska, led by a former beauty queen turned schoolmarm politician-turned-vortex of hot molten media interest.

Juneau, Juno, what were the odds? It sure seems as if life will be imitating art today, as Palin brings her MacGuff-like clan -- teenaged pregnant daughter, Bristol, and the teenaged father of the baby, Levi Johnston. Rise, evangelical base, and hail their choice to keep the baby.

This sounds way too familiar. So I called my friend Jason Reitman, the director of "Juno" to ask him. " You'll recall that this tiny film that was not about teenaged pregnancy even while being about teenaged pregnancy somehow grossed over $100 million, and became Oscar nominee for Best Picture.

Reitman, first of all, is Canadian and not voting.  Regardless, any similarities between Juno and Juneau are, he insists, pure coincidence. "Twenty-four hours into this story, there's no real way to tell whether life is imitating art or not," he said from his home in Los Angeles. "You've got a 17-year-old pregnant teenager, and Juneau is the capital of Alaska. The coincidence is cute."

But, he insisted, his movie tried hard not to make a political statement. "'Juno' is not about pregnancy," he said. "It's a location. I do not want to tell people what to think. They have to come up with their own conclusion. Just don't judge." (Isn't that its own kind of conclusion?)

Reitman insists he has no political point of view on any of this. Who's business is Palin's daughter's pregnancy anyway?

"Juno" is not about choosing to keep a baby or not, he said: "It's just about a teenaged girl who grows up too fast, and a 30-year-old man who won't grow up." Then the director went to put his toddler daughter to bed.

Comments

[DeliLama]

...and don't forget the Gina Davis short-lived series about a woman president which was supposed to be like Hillary, but is much more like Sarah Palin (Vice President when the President gets a stroke and suddenly is in charge).

[Beldar]

Dunno where that .jpg of the mock-movie poster came from, but it deliberately misquotes Sarah Palin. They left out the word "explicit" before "sex-ed." Source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/02/palin_slashed_funding_to_help.html?hpid=artslot

And how rude, how amazingly presumptuous, to assume that Gov. Palin and her husband had not already educated their children. The fact of the matter is that teen pregnancies happen despite sex education because teen-agers make bad choices. When people are young and irresponsible, they tend to be young and irresponsible. For all that any of these mocking morons know, Bristol Palin was using birth control that failed. But frankly, it's none of their damn business.

[Donna B.]

There were three girls the same age who grew up together on my street, one of them my daughter. Her two friends were opposites. One was religious, shy, took care of her grandmother while her mother worked and was a "model" young lady.

The other tried drugs, was wild in the worst sense of the word and a "bad influence".

My daughter was somewhere in between -- an enjoyment of the wild occasionally combined with the recognition that responsibility was rewarding.

Guess which girl got pregnant first? Guess which two out of the three got pregnant before marriage. Guess which ones have been married twice already? (All are under 30.)

Keep guessing, I'm not going to tell you because it would just upset you :-)

Let it be known that the best and most education resulted in the lower number of pregnancies before or after marriage and in the lower number of marriages.

Let it be known that one of the three overcame becoming a teenaged mother and now has her advanced degree that she always wanted.

One of the others is a happy stay-at-home-mom and not only good at, but thrilled with, her job.

Life is strange. All three of these girls are now fine examples of courage and making the best out of whatever life (and the consequences of your choices) hands you.

Hurray for not judging!