I was reading this article on Juno in the latest Entertainment Weekly, and I just wanted to ask. There is a furious bidding war underway for the graphic novel rights, isn’t there?
Anyway, it’s not a perfect article, as it resorts to a lot of generalizations that make the piece less persuasive than it could be. (Sound familiar?) But it’s interesting, especially if you compare the sorry state of female leads in current films with the on-going discussion of female characters in super-hero comics. As screenwriter Diablo Cody puts it:
”I think women are often positioned as a support structure for men, and that’s certainly not been my experience. Some women want to be heroes!”
And while the magazine works really hard to paint actress Ellen Page as a stereotypically mopey outsider, she does fire off some great quotes, like this one:
“For the most part, the options for young actresses have been limited to Princesses and Mean Girls. ‘You either have the rich Laguna Beach thing, where the only thing they’re worrying about is what jeans to wear to impress Bobby,’ says Page, ‘or you have the girl who dresses in black and cuts herself.’”
(Just as a disclaimer, I haven’t seen the movie yet, and while general opinion seems to be overwhelmingly favorable, I’ve hated lots of movies that have enjoyed that kind of acclaim. [I’m looking at you, Sideways.] I just liked some of the parallels.)