Oh Armageddon and Pregnancy...

Southland Tales(dir. Richard Kelly)
The film is undeniably a mess, but it's ambition is both dumbfounding and brilliant. The dialogue is rather juvenile and is often repeated to make it seem more "profound" than it really is. The film is basically INLAND EMPIRE mixed with Idiocracy. It doesn't quite have the sense of unease or spontaneity found in INLAND and it's future world is not as fully realized as the one found in Idiocracy, but it exceeds both in ambition or is at least on par with both. It's really growing on me, but I can understand how someone can think it's horrible since it mentions all these texts and events currently going on without really dwelling on them in any sort of intelligent way and it's either complicated as all hell or really just super simple. It drags here and there mainly because there's a portion in the middle that seems to be at a standstill narratively, but the ending quickly makes up for it in it's gonzo way. I recommend.
*** out of ****
Juno(dir. Jason Reitman)
I can't stand Juno, not the movie, the character. While watching this, the question comes up, "why does everybody love this character?" I'm not going to say it's totally Ellen Page's fault because her dialogue is easily the most overwritten out of the bunch with all it's hipster reference-ism and all that jazz and any character that deems Sonic Youth as just noise is bound to appear unlikeable to this viewer, but all the other characters are so damn likable in comparison that my annoyance with her just stands out so much more. The music was universally awful outside of the Cat Power song and even that was one of her shittier songs. I've read a lot of reviews that talked about how they were thinking about running out of the theater because of how excruciating since the beginning goes a little overboard with the quirk. I thought they were exaggerating until I saw it. The best way to describe it is if that beginning credit sequence was a living thing, I would have probably murdered. It was that excruciating in it's quirkiness, but the film, like most reviews have stated, got a lot better as it went along. I'd imagine if you love the character of Juno, you would love the movie as well, but I ended up sympathizing with Michael Cera's character more and when their romance blossoms, I was really just happy for him instead of Juno. It was decent.
**1/2 out of ****