Wasted Continuum

Today, Juno came out on DVD. There are many reasons why this is important for me, but I won’t rehash them here. What I would like to mention is that I bought the special edition which came with a digital copy of it. That I already knew. The cool thing is that It also came with the shooting script for the movie. This is the coolest thing that they can do besides including a hamburger phone.

The day is near. April 15th. No, I’m not talking about tax day. Who cares about that? What I’m referring to is the day that Juno comes out on DVD. Yes, Juno, easily my favorite movie from last year. I, and I’m sure I’m not alone on this one, am crazy about Ellen Page. Before Juno, I mostly knew her work on Hard Candy and a small part on X-Men. Hard Candy was such a great heavy, dramatic movie. I thought Page was just intense in it. When I watched Juno, I was blown away at not only how amazing she is at comedy but that she has musical talent. If you are one of the seven people in this world that has not seen Juno yet you can get a small taste of it at Amazon. They have an exclusive deleted scene on there of Ellen singing and playing the guitar in some cafe. It doesn’t spoil the movie in any way. It’s a great clip. I will run out and buy it on Tuesday.

Hulu is a new video streaming service owned by NBC Universal. It launched earlier this year in March. I really didn’t give it a look since it came out. I think I glanced at the site when it was in beta and I remember it not being very useful. Last week, however, I finally gave it a chance and checked it out. After hearing talk about it on a recent episode of TWIT, I wanted to see if Hulu was just a wasted of space.

For those of you who have not heard or seen Hulu yet, it basically is a video streaming site that provides video clips, full TV shows and movies with limited advertising. I was surprised by how minimal the advertisement was. I was a couple episodes of My Name is Earl and the only commercial I really noticed was the beginning screen where it said the episode was brought to you by HP or something like that. On another night, I watched one of my favorite episodes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I Only Have Eyes For You. It was awesome. They have the first two seasons of Buffy.

They don’t only have full episodes of older shows. As I mentioned before, they have Earl and other new shows like The Office. They have a decent selection of movies too, a lot of them full-length. The video quality is good. It is at a much higher resolution than YouTube. You should definitely check out Hulu. It is great for catching up on certain shows or movies or even to discover new shows.

Smart People is a comedy starring Dennis Quaid and the beautiful and talented Ellen Page. Quaid plays professor Lawrence Wetherhold who’s a brilliant, but self-absorbed person. Ellen Page plays his smartass, witty daughter. The basic premise of the movie is that Wetherhold is brilliant in his work, but completely stumped in his life and in love. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but it’s got Ellen Page, people. I’ve been raving about her since Hard Candy. Thomas Haden Church plays Quaid’s screwball brother and seems hilarious. Smart People comes out April 11th.

The Oscars nominations have been announced. I happily surprised that Juno got a lot of attention. Ellen Page is nominated for best actress. I’m rooting for her, but she’s got killer competition. I haven’t seen a lot of these movies this year. The ones I really want to win are Ratatouille for animated feature, Once for music, Ellen Page for best actress, and Juno for screenplay. I can’t really see Ellen Page nabbing it, but I think the other three aren’t out of the question. I personally think that Juno was the best movie I saw last year, but I haven’t seen Michael Clayton. I heard good things about it. I did see No Country for Old Men (the film by Minnesota’s own Coen brothers) and I don’t see what the hype is all about.

I’ve been looking forward to Juno, starring Ellen Page, since I saw the trailer months ago. Some of you may recognize her from X-Men as Kitty Pryde. Her role was too small in that. Those of you who are a bit cooler would recognize her from Hard Candy. If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend it. She does look different in it though. Looks a bit androgynous. Ellen’s performance was powerful and the directing was quite interesting.

Here’s a clip of Ellen on BWE. It’s about two weeks old, but it’s still funny. She tries to steal their webby. Watch it and then go try watching Juno. Apparently, the line was still around the corner at the Uptown Theatre here in Minneapolis this past weekend.

Juno official website