Teen pregnancy just isn't the Oscar-nominated, tabloid-cover romp Hollywood makes it out to be, according to a new report released today in Chicago. Amid the gloomy data noting 400,000 such US births per year (at a public cost of $US7.6 billion), experts cited increasing cultural influence among girls who look to Jamie-Lynn Spears, Bristol Palin and even Juno as models of upstanding teenage motherhood. Alas, as you probably could have guessed, the experts at a subsequent panel discussion begged to differ:

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When Sarah Palin's teenage daughter Bristol revealed her pregnancy earlier this year, all of America played the exciting game "This Thing Is Like That Thing," remarking, "Hail fellow! This young maiden with childe recalls the heroine of the moving picture Juno. For seriousballs!" And it was good. Sadly, Sarah Palin is not Allison Janney, and according to Juno scripter Diablo Cody, Bristol is no Sunny D-swigging Juno, either:

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After taking two months off from her Myspace blog (but not her Twitter), Oscar-winning leopard print fan Diablo Cody returned to the medium yesterday — but this was not to be some simple homecoming. Cody had a bone to pick with fans who she sensed had begun to reject the cool, refreshing taste of Sunny D in favour of a nice, tall glass of Haterade, and the Juno screenwriter wasn't about to suffer their attacks in silence. Instead, in a post entitled "Hello Again! (Starring Shelly Long)," Cody decided to get something off her chest (and it wasn't whipped cream):

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You knew it was bound to happen: Oliver Stone's gauntlet-throw to chronicle a sitting president by Election Day would be one-upped by an ambitious upstart determined to develop, produce and release a film about a campaigning candidate by the same time. And just like that, from a Defamer operative, comes Juneau, the untold story of Bristol Palin, her babydaddy and one Alaskan governor/vice-presidential hopeful to rule them all. Who knew the sleeper hit of the season would come out of the GOP Convention and not Toronto? Even Roger Ebert is into it! Let the bidding war begin.

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The soul-deadening imposition of commercial brands on your moviegoing experience got even more shameless this morning when the oft-overlooked ring of Hell know as "brandcameo" unveiled the winners of its fourth annual Product Placement Awards. You could probably guess at least most of the heavyweight competitors — your Apples, your Fords, your Manolos — from a glance at the last year's worth of releases, but that doesn't make the year's findings any less remarkable in context: The surveyors counted an average of 22.1 brands in each of the 20 films this year to have a No. 1 weekend at the box office. That number is down from 2007, when an average of nearly 25 brands were counted among the year's 32 top releases.

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Stop us if you think you've heard this one before, but we've repeatedly stumbled upon cocktail chatter lately in which the topic of Juno—the Oscar-winning 2007 teen pregnancy movie that ushered in a whole generation of pact babies—has come up. More specifically: that there exists a 2005 movie from Korea, called Jeni, Juno, about high school sweethearts who conceive and see their baby to term. According to the movie's Wikipedia entry, Juno screenwriter Diablo Clody was unaware of the other movie's existence when she wrote her screenplay. We've posted the trailer above, with some helpful translation courtesy of Molly McAleer. Beyond the title and basic premise, we think you'll agree the two films couldn't be more different.

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Looking for something to do tonight? Juno screenwriter/ unhealthy-Defamer -preoccupation topic Diablo Cody is curating the New Beverly schedule for the next two weeks, in a programme she calls MONDO DIABLO: Season of the Bitch!. "Call it a festival, a season, or just TWO SOLID WEEKS OF FUCKING RAD SHIT," she writes on her MySpace blog. The fun kicks off tonight with a Reitman family reunion, as both Ivan and Jason will be on hand to answer all your Stripes and Thank You for Smoking-related questions. To sweeten the pot—as if that fucking rad shit-filled pot needed sweetening—Cody has offered to sign your Juno DVDs and Blu-Rays, or your scrotum:

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As he makes the rounds on his Hancock press tour, Jason Bateman has taken time out of plugging the Arrested Development movie to address whether his previous film, the teen pregnancy comedy Juno, was totally responsible for all those Gloucester teenagers who all got pregnant at the same time. Unsurprisingly, he answers in the negative:

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After a long intro confirming both her stoner-film creds and her susceptibility to Mary-Kate Olsen's fashion influence, a new profile of actress Olivia Thirlby eventually got to the real news: Jack and Diane, Thirlby's long-gestating teen-lesbian-werewolf reunion with her Juno pal Ellen Page, will not be coming soon to a theatre near you. We know, we know — a true shocker, but as Thirlby alludes, it's the kind of tough call that a young, sexually ambiguous Oscar-nominee just has to make:

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It was relatively slim pickings at the festival Monday, especially after Guillermo del Toro's live-in-person monster-rhapsodizing was pushed to Thursday and alas, we missed our 4:30 screening about transsexuals in Colorado. Plan C seemed reasonable enough: Drop by the Geffen Playhouse to see a father-son chat between Ivan and Jason Reitman, in which we figured we might catch Dad's jealous flare-up over Juno's success or Son's symbolic shove of his old man into the shadows at stage right. We got neither, though Jason did come clean about that whole nepotism thing.

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