Juno

Last weekend we saw a very cute independent movie at the theater in our neighborhood called "Juno." One of the things I liked about it was the dialog - the main characters are in high school and spoke in what I think is very modern and also creative high school slang (I don't know for sure because I'm getting old and haven't been in high school for a while). A lot of good lines can be found here, but that's only a sampling.

Naturally I was wondering who wrote it and if they indeed were linked in to the modern teenage mind, or just making it all up. It turns out the screenwriter, Diablo Cody, is my age and originally from Chicago but resides in Minneapolis...! I could have known her, although I doubt it because she was a stripper there and I was always locked away in a research lab. She was discovered through her blog (her current manager admits he found her blog while searching for porn one night and immediately realized her writing talent - wow). Her blog has an inappropriate title but is in fact pretty clean and now she writes mostly about what it's like to be a rising star.

I think we should all be motivated by Diablo Cody. She wrote a smart screenplay about high school kids even though she hasn't been in high school for a while, she wrote a smart blog about her life as a stripper, and then she proved that anyone can find your blog and make you famous! Although I don't really have an extremely smart and funny screenplay tucked away to make me even more famous if that actually happens. I'll work on that.

So where Diablo Cody got all that smart modern high school lingo? Maybe it wasn't really high school lingo but just strip club lingo. Or maybe she did make it all up, and it's about to become part of the modern high school lingo (which makes me wonder, is modern high school lingo inspired by smart movies or do smart movies inspire modern lingo? or is this unanswerable... like which came first, the chicken or the egg?).