What I miss most about America right now is having someone to call to meet me for lunch. It’s a simple thing, but it’s always been one of my pure pleasures- just sitting opposite a friend at Hoa Hoa or Santullo’s in the afternoon, a way to break up the day. I don’t know anyone here I can call up to go to lunch with. I think it’d change my perspective on things a good deal, if I did. It’s funny, the things that expat life puts in your head as defining characteristics of your life at home.

So instead I’m having lunch with Cat Power, except she’s just a voice on speakers, but that’s probably for the best- her interviews make her sound flaky, and I would probably be annoyed and frustrated if we were eating together. She’d show up late, and I’d pretend that I hadn’t been there too long so she wouldn’t feel bad… Instead she’s singing a song that Nick Cave wrote and is on another continent, and that is just fine.

Her new record is good, but it’s not the covers record 2, like it had been described. That’s probably good, as it’s the artist’s job to move forward, etc,but it’s also a let down- the hype got to me, and I wanted to hear a sequel. I rarely call for more of the same, but this time I wanted it. I don’t listen to her very often, and I had pretty much forgotten about her, but the Nick Cave song on jukebox got me interested, along with the track she had on the juno soundtrack- an old one, but one that I didn’t know very well. Reminded me of how good she can be when she delivers.

The movie the song came from was pretty much my favorite ever- you know how sometimes something just strikes you and you don’t care if it’s the best thing ever or if anyone else criticizes it or how valid their criticisms are? That’s how I feel about juno.

There’s been some discussion on the movie- TimeOut London gave it a miserable review, describing it as anti-abortion propaganda. The New York Times echoed the sentiment regarding waitress and knocked up. It’s bizarre to me to claim that pro-choice people would cede the rhetorical high ground here- one of the more compelling arguments for legalized abortion is that it’s a choice, that it’s not made up of people who just want to see as many women get abortions as possible. It’s often lamented how the terminology has been slanted- how the anti-choice crowd got pro-life, which everyone except maybe Erin Parr and Glenn Danzig would claim to be, at least semantically. The contrast on the abortion issue has always been pro-choice / anti-choice, not pro-life / anti-life. No one involved is anti-life. But when you start attacking movies because they’re about women who choose not to have abortions, then you’re muddying that line. The point is that it’s a choice, and it’s not anti-choice to choose to carry to term…

But I’m veering dangerously to a topic that will quickly lead me to politics- I’m mere sentences away from a Ron Paul or Mike Huckabee joke, which’ll veer me in the direction of comparing Bill Clinton’s smug managing of his wife’s campaign to Bill Bellichick, and I’ll end up spending another five paragraphs talking about Tom Brady and Eli Manning, and I promised myself no football today.

So, juno. The timeout review suggests that the viewer should go watch ghost world instead, which is telling- a review by a dude prefers a depiction of teenage girl-hood written and envisioned by a man than a woman. You’ll notice that in juno the male characters aren’t fully realized, depth-charged and sympathetic depictions of what it’s like to have a girl like Juno in one’s life; similarly, you may notice that the movie’s actually about Juno, rather than about how Juno is defined by the men in her life. It’s an interesting approach to fiction, especially film, and I see why it might make a magazine reviewer uncomfortable. I dug it, though- maybe I’m just way too much of a sensitive dude. But contrast the way Jason Bateman’s character in juno is portrayed against Paul Rudd’s in knocked up- Rudd is depicted as a loveable goofball who we should all feel bad for because he’s had to grow up a bit and accept some of the responsibility that comes with having a family, while Bateman’s is more accurately depicted as shady and immature for trying to cling to his faded idea of himself as a hip punk rocker while he’s supposed to be preparing to be a father. Yeah, I think male arrested adolescence is celebrated often enough in film, and I have no problem seeing what a woman might think of the subject. Maybe the dudes who aren’t busy looking for reasons to decry the film as propaganda and inferior to Dan Clowes’ creepy fantasies about what teenage girlhood might be like would learn something if they considered a perspective that wasn’t attached to making them heroes.

But what the hell do I know? I am twenty-seven years old and I am sad that I haven’t got any dudes around to eat lunch and talk about batman with. But are those things mutually exclusive?

Something else that juno did well was incorporate all the pop-culture name-dropping that I usually despise in movies thoroughly into the characters. Not to keep ragging on knocked up, but man- at least a quarter of that script had to just be quotes from other movies that the characters/writers liked… It’s usually lazy and a cheap way to connect to an audience, and I know all about cheap ways to connect to an audience. juno neatly inverted that, by acknowledging that it creates an artificial connection, not a real one. Of course a sixteen year old can appear to relate to a thirty-something grown-ass man if she’s talking about seventies and eighties punk rock and horror films, but when you get past that, there’s no substance there. It’s funny that juno is mentioned so often in the same breath as knocked up, because it seems to render that movie completely redundant and ridiculous.

Well, what can you do? Apparently juno will be nominated for awards and knocked up will not, so score one for good taste, if not box office superstardom.