Doesn't Ellen Page look slightly off in that picture, or is it just me? What's going on with the legs - what's all that about, eh?

The last ever true sleeper-hit was Sister Act (and even that had a brilliant trailer). All the sleepers since then have been movies that studios had high hopes for, but market as sleepers.

The TWBB backlash has been going on, as it should because it is overrated.

Didn't TWBB already suffer backlash? It seems like it had its fair share almost from the start. I'd love to say I'm above it all but truth be told I often fall into the same traps. For instance, I still haven't seen Juno (I'm avoiding it) and I feel that once I do I will hate it. But I've felt that way before and been pleasantly surprised. Nevertheless, mondo-hype surrounding a movie does affect the way one feels about it.

When I first began exploring film seriously as a ten-year old I spent most of my reading about great films rather than seeing them because of no cable or video availability. By the time I saw them I was probably disappointed with at least a quarter of them because I was expecting something absolutely groundbreaking. Then upon revisiting them again and again over the years I would understand the praise better. But getting over that initial hype can be an ardous task.

Oh and that cover pic of Ellen Page is one of the most pretentious things I've ever seen. Hands half in pocket, feet turned in - it's making me hate it more and I shouldn't feel that about a movie I haven't seen. Hopefully these feelings will be undid, home skillet.

What the hell is a "pork sword"? Are those your own words, sicko?

JE: Noop. Direct quote from Juno in "Juno."

Funny, because that issue was the first I received in my new EW subscription (hooray for My Coke Rewards), and I just stumbled upon that milkshake video for the first time last night (after coming home from my fifth viewing of There Will Be Blood, which I now feel I've totally 'seen' and can name with assurance as my favorite of the year).

So yeah, is it me, or has VH1 culture become a bit too self-conscious? I wasn't alive to watch the evolution of something like Brian DePalma's Scarface from release to cult classic, but it does seem that everyone is on the lookout for the "next big thing" now more than ever. I love TWBB but people need to come to it on their own terms, and I too am already sick to death of Juno after having felt won over by it.

"Little Miss Sunshine" is the Howard Dean to the Barack Obama that is "Juno." The phenomena surround each may feel the same, but the quantitative and qualitative differences are immense.

Is this great video game gag evidence that Juno really has tapped into that big jackpot known as the zeitgeist? Or should we trust Jean-Luc Godard's comment (which I remember Richard Corliss inserting into a big Time magazine cover story on Platoon way back when) that a movie's popularity is usually the inverse of its quality? (The previous was a paraphrase so inaccurate as to be considered a whole new phrase, but I couldn't find it on the Internets, which makes me wonder if Godard really ever said it at all.)

But I can't take time to worry about all that right now. I'm too busy wiping the tears out of my eyes caused by the following direct quote:

"Just imagine wielding a Wii pork sword. Can you impregnate Juno -- and win?"

Okay, I now officially know my weekend will be a good one.

Jim,

I couldn't agree more with your assessment that:

"This is when I feel a little sorry for people who didn't see the movie back when they could still at least feel like they were discovering it for themselves -- even if the "Little Movie That Could" was just a Fox Searchlight marketing ploy."

There are three movies I have still yet to "get" because of this very reason. I never liked Napoleon Dynamite, The Full Monty, and Little Miss Sunshine, and I am pissed because I think that (even though they probably aren't great films) my opinion was already formed due to the barrage of ads being crammed down my throat claiming it's the "feel good movie of the year" or some crap like that.

I also think that my ability to even enjoy the films on their basic level (and they are basic films) and my ability to try and look at them objectively, to at least understand why people liked them, was affected, too.

I am glad I saw Juno before all of this came out. Mostly because I cannot stand it when magazine like Juno are telling me what abotu the cute little indie flick that everyone is rushing to see. That just makes me WANT to hate, and I feel like every film deserves a fair shake (unless it stars Dane Cook).

It's always an interesting case when things like this happen. I know that for me I still wanted to see The Full Monty, Napoleon Dynamite, and Little Miss Sunshine simply because people I knew told me they were great movies. But when do you begin to disregard outside opinion for better (your freinds) or worse (the studio hype machine that got The Full Monty an Oscar nomination!), and how do you balance that?

I had already hated Napoleon Dynamite before I even saw it because I work with high school kids and the constant quoting and really bad impersonations were driving me crazy. I didn't think he was funny or the film had any neat or cool qualities because of how bored I was of the schitck before I even saw the film.

I wonder if this is a good thing or a bad thing? With Juno, is it good that people are spending money to see this film or bad that a film so many people have disliked has made over 100+ million? Isn't better that people are deciding to head out to their local movie theaters and plop down $7.50 for something like Juno, rather than The Heartbreak Kid or Good Luck Chuck?

I am glad I saw Juno before all of this (even your great blogs about it) because I was able to go into the film without expecting it to be what so many people claim for it to be: a cute little hipster film.

Get past those first kitchy fifteen minutes, and you have a film that has the ability to surprise you with some great performances.

Ms. Page appears to be imitating the knocked-kneed stance employed by Elvis Costello on the cover of "My Aim is True". I bet some 30-year-old photographer compelled her to do that.

I am so annoyed by the cleverness of it all!! Make the bad hipsters stop!!

The internet has become the best and worst thing ever.

Well, this is exactly what I've said in a prior post. A movie isn't great because it's popular - but it's not bad because it's popular either.

I think it's just as much of a shame to be sucked into hating a movie because you can't stand the hype -- as it is to love a movie because of the hype. You are doing yourself a disservice allowing yourself to hate a movie "just because" - and it's not fair to the filmmakers, the actors or the movie.

If you have the self control not to love a movie just because it's popular ... then don't fall into the elitist backlash, and have the self-control not to start hating it just because it's popular. The latter weakness is as bad as the first, in my opinion, and is why I battle against being overly scholarly on these things (even though I love reading the scholarly analysis or I wouldn't be here).

Jonathon,

If you think the picture on the cover is pretentious, then you don't want to see the pictures inside...eck. They'll make you never want to see the movie.

Jim,

They've been saying "Juno" was the next "Little Miss Sunshine" since friggin' Sundance last year. Immediately it turned me off of seeing the movie. I was turned back on when I found out who was in it. Then mildly turned off again when I saw it. Whaddya gonna do?

I remember hearing about Juno early in the year and thinking, Great, here's another Little Miss Sunshine, a film I heard about through all of 2006 and hated. I was fully prepared to roll my eyes at Juno, but it completely won me over and more than survived my own backlash.

People who I know who have seen There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men only recently have loved those films as well, because those two -- unlike Crash, Mystic River, A Beautiful Mind, etc. -- are actually great films. I think they'll all survive any backlash and endure, and I'm more excited for the Oscars this year than I have been in years.

I remember the same thing happening to the Blair Witch Project. That movie received so much publicity that it eventually wasn't scary anymore. Everyone started asking "What's all the hype about? You don't even see the monster!"

They missed the point completely.

RE: Juno at Sundance. Juno never premiered at Sundance. It premiered at Telluride, and then a week later at Toronto. By that time I had already seen the trailer for it a dozen times. This movie was definitely sold as the "little movie that could" months before it opened. Philip isn't the only person I've heard claim that the movie opened at Sundance, either. The studio wants to pretend it did, and that it's had buzz since then.

JE: For the record: "Little Miss Sunshine" premiered at Sundance in January, 2006, and opened theatrically in July. "Juno" was at Telluride and then Toronto in September, as you say. It opened theatrically in limited release Dec. 5, 2007, then went wide Dec. 25.

As a rule, I try to avoid reading or learning anything about a movie I'm interested in as much as possible until I've seen it. I'm not so sure I can still call it a rule considering how often I break it (I think I've seen the Dark Knight trailer about 15 times), but hey, I try.

I think one of the reasons I enjoyed Breach so much (besides the fact it's a very good movie) is that I went into it almost completely in the dark. I knew the general outlines of the true story, sure, but I read nothing about the movie itself because, well, I wasn't very interested in it until I watched it. It can also work the other way, though -- I went into There Will Be Blood having already heard a lot of the backlash, but I completely dismissed it and really expected to enjoy the movie anyway. By the end, well... I could see where some of that backlash was coming from.

So did the backlash effect my opinion? I don't think it did, but it's really hard to say. It's interesting that you use the comparison of the effect of advertising on society. Most people say ads don't affect them, but that's because most people think in terms of the hypodermic needle model -- you don't watch an ad for Pepsi and immediately go and buy a Pepsi. But when the brand "Pepsi" is so ingrained in your mind that you immediately think to use it in an example of the effects of advertising, that's the result of the long-term effects of advertising.

I'm not so sure that's what's going on with movie hype, though, simply because a movie's hype lasts only so long before everyone moves on to the "next big thing." (Everyone calls Juno "the next Little Miss Sunshine", which makes me wonder whatever happened to the next My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Or was that Little Miss Sunshine?)

I suppose it's a matter of time and momentum -- certain movies definitely do reach that saturation point where the very aura of it is defined by the insane cycle of critical praise, backlash, backlash to backlash, and back to critical praise again. Then you hear the title "Juno" and think "That little movie that could" like a goddamn trained monkey, and you're forever robbed of watching the movie for the first time on your own terms.

I guess if you can take away anything from it, it's that it proves you wait to watch a movie on DVD at your own peril.

(On the subject of games, by the way, the same insanity takes place. When BioShock came out last August, for instance, it was almost universally praised as one of the best games in years. Then it came time to start picking games of the year, and it was interesting to see who was already dishing out the backlash. Portal suffered some of this as well, and in a way, now that I think of it, that's similar to Juno. This was a game that no one expected much out of, until they played it and discovered how surprisingly smart, funny, and clever it was, and immediately jumped on it as the best thing ever. At least, just long enough for everyone to jump off it and call it over-hyped. I guess it's just human nature.)

zetes and Jim,

Ah-ha.

Thank you for clearing the air. Regardless of where it began, the hype stunk from the very beginning.

I'm of the opinion that Juno did well in spite of Ellen Page rather than because of her. People went to see it because of Michael Cera and the popularity of Superbad and to a lesser extent Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman.

The supporting cast are stars in their own right. It's not like it was a bunch of unknowns like Napoleon Dynamite.

Just so you know, there isn't actually going to be a Juno video game. The news story was a misquote, they weren't saying they were going to make a Juno game ... they wanted to make a game LIKE Juno (in the sense that it's a small project that makes a ton of money). Here's the link to the 1up.com story.

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3166099

Full disclosure: I wrote that 1UP story. And it was actually this post that compelled me to, Jim, as it's what brought the story to my attention, which then allowed me to bring it to my editor's attention.

It was a little more complicated than a false rumor, though. I didn't write the original story for our site, so I'm not 100% sure of the series of events. But from what I gathered the story didn't start with the Surfer Girl post, but with the comment by Keith Boesky (of Boesky & Company), who consults in the matters of migrating intellectual property to video games. GameSpot originally reported the story based on Boesky's comment, which he later clarified. Then I believe GameSpot added the Surfer Girl bit to their story in the update. It just happened to be a coincidence that Surfer Girl posted a joke about a Juno game at the same time someone at DICE made a comment that sounded like there was going to be a Juno game. Therefore, the Surfer Girl post seemed more authentic than it was intended to be, although it had little to do with actually starting the false information. That the stories on other websites that piggybacked on GameSpot's report (such as Joystiq's or our own) made no mention of the Surfer Girl bit seems to support this. At least, that's as far as I could piece it together -- it's difficult without knowing when GameSpot updated their story, and what they updated it with.

And that's a lot more than probably ever needed to be written about this non-issue. The important note: there is no Juno video game, and thank the heavens for that.

Oh, and apologies for derailing the conversation -- we can all get back to what your post was actually about now.

Thanks for the clarifications, Cyril and Kris. The GameSpot story did indeed cite Surfer Girl as a source, after Boesky said he'd been misunderstood. You know how this web thing goes: I read some mention of a possible "Juno" game somewhere, that linked to GameSpot, and that linked to Surfer Girl! If anything, this illustrates the central idea behind this post, which is how the PR perception of a movie alters the perception of the movie itself -- whether you've seen it or not...

From GameSpot's update:

However, Boesky's pointed clarification hasn't completely deflated talk of a Juno game. On Monday, the mysterious blogger known as Surfer Girl, who has been the source of numerous game-industry leaks, claimed in a typically cryptic post that Fox Searchlight had enlisted Crave Entertainment and 7 Studios to make a Juno game.

I'm of the opinion that Juno did well in spite of Ellen Page rather than because of her. People went to see it because of Michael Cera and the popularity of Superbad and to a lesser extent Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman.

Sam - I don't know. The film has incredible legs at the box office, which can't be attributed to any of the leads - either Page, or the other three.

[Re: discredited Juno game story/joke/rumor]:

I am a member of a private forum for industry professionals, some of whom have admitted that secret stuff has leaked out this way. And others have pointed out where these blogs can be very mistaken. So don’t take them as gospel.

Yeah, I just wrote a quick blog post about that Juno article. It was the reference to Heathers an Ghost World that really got my goat. And the implication that Juno is the voice of her generation - which is also MY generation. Oh, please God no.

Just watched Juno this weekend. I did my damnedest to ignore all pre-existing hype/anti-hype for the movie and liked it quite a lot. And the soundtrack didn't bother me in the slightest, and I largely disdain movie soundtracks.

As for "Little Miss Sunshine"... didn't bother finishing it. That tops my list of the most over-rated films of recent years. Is this a paradox?

H

When it comes to how much studio hype for a movie affects me, I don't want to be among the ignorant masses who claim that they are unaffected when actually it can be proven that they are, but I'd say that one conversation with one friend of mine probably influences my opinions of movies 100x as much.