JUNO is JOY

My Gawd it's boring as Heck being a night-owl at the moment. The TV is appalling. The Sopranos is over, Weeds and Dexter are between series, the Sarah Silverman Show is back, but it's repeats, the new series of Lead Balloon is some way off, and the second series of Jam and Jerusalem has just finished (I think; because the BBC doesn't deign to tell us mere TV-Tax payers anything). I'm currently watching my DVD of series 1 of Love Soup about every 3rd or 4th day, as I wait for the new one to come along. It is sheer Heck, with Paramount UK running Terry and June (the antithesis of comedy) and the Liver Birds, and those terrible Confessions of ... movies. Nightmare.

You know, I had a Sony Betamax Video Recorder and it cost around £700 ($1,500). In those days it cost somewhere in the region of £60 ($120) for a video film, which is why there where so many video shops. Within a few years the price of the machines halved, and so did the price of the video films, but the video shops still got the releases before the general public. Anyway, way back then I bought a lot of 'used' and unpopular videos from my local video shop and one of those was a movie I'd rented twice and enjoyed, but it just wasn't much of a mover, amidst a sea of blockbusters - it was called Blood Simple, and I paid £8 ($16) for it.

Ever since then I've been a fan of the Coen brothers. I even enjoyed The Hudsucker Proxy, and their latest movie, No Country for Old Men, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name, is, I think, rightly being hailed as a return to form for the brothers. Although I'm not one of the fans who wants a 'triumphant return' to Blood Simple territory, as The Big Labowski is my absolute favourite by the brothers C.

But Juno, Juno is joy. There isn't one single fat moment in that movie. Not one single second of time is wasted, from the opening credits to the final note on the end credits, Juno is an experience.

The casting is superb, and it includes the father and son team from Arrested Development, Michael Cera and Jason Bateman, Alias star Jennifer Garner (marvelous), Olivia Thirlby, and Ellen Page, as Juno MaGuff.

I can't wait for the DVD which I hope will be crammed with extras including details about Shadowplay Studios excellent work on the opening credits. As I said, I love the work of the Coen brothers to bits, but this is the best film I've seen in a long time, by far.