Holiday Movie Roundup

(3 of 3)

With all the anguish that accompanies most debates about teenage pregnancy, it's fun to meet a girl for whom being pregnant is a) kind of, like, a huge drag but also weirdly interesting and b) a chance to, you know, find some folks who want a baby and hand one over. That young woman is Juno MacGuff, a misfit teen with a plucky, distinctive view on life (she finds prospective adoptive parents in a supermarket circular) and an idiosyncratic vocabulary to go with it (she refers to her fetus as a "sea monkey"). The movie was written, in one of those only-in-Hollywood scenarios, by the equally idiosyncratic Diablo Cody after a talent manager stumbled across her blog and got her a deal. Garner and Jason Bateman play the potential parents, but it's Juno's dad (J.K. Simmons) and stepmom (Allison Janney) who steal the show. This is not the first movie this year in which people get pregnant and then find out how they feel about each other, but it could be the most humane.n