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We ended up seeing Juno kind of by accident. We had free tickets, and I wanted to go see The Kite Runner, but it was only showing at Broadway and Chatswood and I didn’t really feel like catching a train into the city purely to see a film. But, I’m glad I did see Juno, because it was a sarcastic, cynical, yet oddly-hopeful story about the pregnant high school student who navigates the complications of how to deal with her unexpected…um, windfall. It’s one of those comedy-dramas which can engage with such issues and still make you laugh.

The film opens with a chair – the chair in which Juno Macguff (Ellen Page), sixteen, had sex with her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and, ultimately, became pregnant. After her third pregnancy test coming back positive, Juno elects to have an abortion, but has second thoughts after she is told that a foetus has fingernails and decides instead to go through with the pregnancy and give up her baby for adoption. Juno finds a rich, childless, yuppie couple who are eager to care for her child, and spends time bonding with the prospective adoptive father, Mark (Jason Bateman) over their shared interests in rock music and avant-garde horror. However, not all goes to plan and Juno has to confront the approaching birth, the realities of surrendering a child, Bleeker’s feelings, and the complications of her relationship to the adoptive parents.

The film’s strengths lie clearly in the creation of normal characters who do not offer even a whiff of contrivance. Ellen Page is especially good (I note she is being lauded as the Next Big Thing in indie film) as the titular character – she is sassy, intelligent, witty, cynical, but scared. Sort of like a knocked-up Buffy Summers. The dialogue flows fast and it flows sarcastic and laden with (mostly) funny observations on pregnancy, high school and the social context of having babies in America.

Juno does not dwell much on her bond with the baby growing inside her; when she tells her friend she is pregnant, there is no anger or tears, simply a conversation on a hamburger phone affirming that she is, fo’shizz, up the spout. The half-expected gooing and gaaing over the baby is absent and left largely to Vanessa (brilliantly played by Jennifer Garner), the neurotic, hypermaternal adoptive mother who thinks she can learn mothercraft purely from books.

Any questions about the morality of teenage pregnancy are generally channelled through Juno’s father, but the matter is dropped early in the film (once the identity of the father is established, any disapproval is left to the occasional raised eyebrow by Juno’s father), perhaps to avoid alienating the film’s prospective audience, but more likely because sexually-active teenagers are the norm these days and perhaps it isn’t really a big issue for non-Christians to question whether or not such behaviour is OK.

A neat soundtrack and a happy ending tied this film up for me. Not the greatest piece of cinema ever, but a clever and entertaining one. Three and-a-half stars, Margaret.

Or, An Exposition on the Connexion Between Illinois and Sydney; or, If I was a Woman, I Would Want to Marry Sufjan.

Otherworldly is one way to describe Sufjan Stevens’ music. Banjo-fuelled, brass-pumped, gorgeous indie-pop chaos might be another. Whichever one you pick sort of depends on the song you’re listening to. Either way, beauty and awesomeness are the common denominators, and that’s what we got when we went to his third and final Sydney concert at the State Theatre on Monday.

The night opened quietly – Sufjan walked onstage, sat himself at the grand piano, and played a quiet, lilting version of Romulus, a song of shame and grandfathers dying in hospital gowns. I remember the chords echoed off the walls and you could almost hear people blinking as the final notes rang out, just before the applause lifted. Without breaking, the curtains then came up and we were taken from the sublime to the thunderous crescendo of Seven Swans. The rest of the show was a solid two hours of music fantastic, encompassing the poetry and horror of a piano version of John Wayne Gacey, Jr to the awesome awesome AWESOME brass staccato madness of Come On, Feel The Illinois!...and three encores.

We also got to hear some stuff not on his CDs, like the experimental tone poem BQE (accompanied by what I assume is an original video clip of the song’s namesake) and the majesty of Majesty, Snowbird, which is one of my favourite songs now.

When he is not singing, Sufjan seemed quiet and unassuming, and a little nervous (he kept wiping sweat from his face and mentioned, at one interlude, that he doesn’t know how to end banter). But, he did give a very entertaining intro to The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us! involving macaroni and cheese, toilet paper dolls, and about a thousand swiss cake rolls:

”...and I was, like, ‘No way, man, that’s not Doctor Spock. It’s Madonna…and she’s singing ‘Borderline’...and he was, like, “That’s not Madonna…it’s the predatory wasp of the Palisades, and it’s out to get us!”

I was surprised at how much stuff he played from Seven Swans, his quieter, reflective, more overtly Christian album. The title song made a most excellent live song, completely with a projected video of stars melting in and out of constellations; I was happy about the simple and repetitious All the Trees of the Field Will Clap their Hands making it into the set list; and Lorien was excited when, for his final final encore, Sufjan played a bare version of The Dress Looks Nice on You.

I have not seen many gigs in my time – however, it will be very difficult for anyone to top the perfection that was Sufjan Stevens on January 14, 2008.

Set list (sort-of in order):

• Romulus
• Seven Swans
• Concerning the UFO Sighting in Highland, Illinois
• The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You’re Going to Have to Leave Now, or, ‘I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!’
• Come On, Feel the Illinois! (‘The World’s Columbian Exposition’ and ‘Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream’, separated by a mad saxophone solo)
• Casimir Pulaski Day
• All The Trees of The Field Will Clap their Hands
• Jacksonville
• BQE
• The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!
• John Wayne Gacy, Jr.
• The Lord God Bird
• Barn Owl, Nightkiller
• Majesty, Snowbird

First encore:

• Chicago

Second encore:

• To Be Alone With You

Third encore:

• The Dress Looks Nice on You

I guess there are two ways you can look at Transformers. You could look at the film from the perspective of whether or not the script was interesting and flawless, whether the characters were compelling, whether or not the narrative flowed effortlessly, whether the cinematography was awe-inspiring and fluid, and whether the whole thing seems to fit together. Alternatively, you can do what I did and slaver over the special effects and the at-times nifty cinematography and try your best to ignore all the holes in the narrative, the complete lack of characterisation, the weird plot shifts, the annoying comic relief, and the lame scripting.

Director Michael Bay seems to have recognised that there is probably no way you could make a movie about giant alien robots who come from a planet called Cybertron credible or intelligent. So, it appears he has made a film which is cinematic (some of the camerawork was amazing), yet silly and very aware of the ludicrous nature of its subject matter. This is not a film you go to see with friends which you can talk about intelligently over coffee afterwards – this is a film go to in order to see incredible robot death action so you can rave about it afterwards with your friends like twelve year-olds. You go because you are lusting after the special effects, and Bay makes the wise decision to spend much of the film satisfying that lust. From the opening minutes, we are hit with a Transformer going mad in the desert of Qatar, blowing up helicopters and tanks – from there, it’s a rollercoaster that lasts for about two hours and culminates in the Autobots and Decepticons battling it out in the streets while a high school kid tries to outwit the mammoth Megatron (voiced, surprisingly, by Hugo Weaving). This movie is loud and long and screams from its opening frames right through to the end, and I have to say that I loved it.

And, I’m surprised that I loved it. This is a film which is a big, slow-moving target for the critics. After all, we’re talking about giant alien robots who crash-land on Earth to fight a war over a cube-shaped device (the ‘Allspark’) which has the power to make inanimate objects into crazy killing machines. The evil robots, called Decepticons (which is only mildly better than ‘Autobots’), track down a teenage boy who is selling artefacts which contain details about the Allspark’s location on eBay – the evil robots obtain his eBay user name and hunt him down. Thankfully, he is saved by Bumblebee, an Autobot who transforms into an old Camero. Throughout the rest of the film, we meet the rest of the good guys, including Optimus Prime, and watch them talk, socialise, and thrash Decepticons senseless. Tagging along are some dorky secret agents, the token loud black man who seems to do nothing except scream in a high voice, and a spider-like robot who reminded me of the soldier robots in Star Wars: Episode One. It is film that is about one boy saving the world from destruction by helping the Autobots and getting caught up with US Special Forces and students-cum-hackers.

It is utterly ridiculous and utterly ludicrous, but somehow, it works.