What to Watch on TV this Weekend: Chloe's Guide

Sept. 23–25, 2016

Here are a few suggestions for what to watch on the upcoming weekend.

Juno (2007)

Friday, Sept. 23 - HBO - 2:50 p.m.

Ellen Page stars as the film's titular character, a dryly precocious and smart-mouthed sophomore in high school, who discovers she is pregnant after her first sexual encounter. Michael Cera stars as the father-to-be alongside Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner, whose characters are a married couple seeking to adopt Juno's child. This arrangement seems to be the answer to Juno's unexpected dilemma, but through a series of confusing—but overall enlightening—events, the protagonist comes to realize that she is the heroine of her own story.

I watched Juno for the first time around the same age as the eponymous teenager. It feels like a Greg Mottola film, but reads like the handiwork of Judd Apatow, with characters employing a colorfully offbeat colloquialisms that are almost a language to their own.

Juno's debut came with limited release; the film played in seven theaters in Los Angeles and New York City and initially grossed $420,113, eventually becoming Fox Searchlight's first film to surpass $100 million at the box office. The film's director, Jason Reitman, was previously known for his work with Thank You for Smoking (2005) and subsequently for the U.S. version of television series The Office, Up in the Air (2009)and Young Adult (2011).

Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

Saturday, Sept. 24- BET- 9:30 p.m.

Pursuit of Happyness is a biographical drama based on entrepreneur Chris Gardner's nearly one-year struggle with homelessness, with the altered spelling of the film's title stemming from a mural that Gardner saw on the wall outside of the daycare facility that his son attended four-time Grammy Award winner Will Smith plays Gardner, with real-life son Jaden Smith starring as Gardner's then-5-year-old son, Christopher.

The audience swiftly learns that Gardner's homelessness is a consequence of his divorce from Christopher's mother and simultaneous financial erosion resulting from a luckless investment in portable bone density scanners. It is not where Gardner and his son begin, however, that the heart of the story beats, but rather, it is in the pair's journey, which unfolds in heart-wrenching and heart-warming illustration within a 117-minute production.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Sunday, Sept. 25- Cinemax- 11:50 a.m.

I was a newcomer to the Mad Max franchise at the time of the Fury Road release, but I was swiftly captivated by the film's fast pace and post-apocalyptic, edge-of-the-seat action. Tom Hardy (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, The Revenant) stars as the titular nomad, for whom trouble seems to follow from the very commencement. Despite the character's eponymous narrative, the story centers more so on Max's accidental companion, turncoat heroine Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who seeks to flee from the abominable dictatorship of Immortan Joe with his slave-wives (Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee and Courtney Eaton).

The characters' rapid-fire exploits are never-ending, unfolding in bright and stylized cinematography over the course of a 120-minute construction. Fury Road secured a number of critical and guild awards, receiving 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director for George Miller, and winning six: Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing.

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