'Juno' it's pretty good?

What makes a good soundtrack? Should it be a compilation of your favorite songs, like an awesome "movie mixtape"? Or should it be some artists you don't recognize, but enjoyed when you heard their snippets of music during the movie? Or maybe it should be all by one artist, an original score -- like a John Williams-arranged orchestra? \nThere is no correct answer in this situation (other than that it's a bad idea to start a review with a rhetorical question). But movie soundtracks comprise one of the most wide-ranging and overlooked sectors of the music industry. \n"Juno," the Jason Reitman film starring Ellen Page and Michael Cera was released in theaters not long ago, and along with it came its unique and eclectic soundtrack. With its many samplings of popular indie artists, it has garnered comparisons to the Garden State soundtrack, arguably one of the most popular soundtracks in recent history.\nThe Juno soundtrack is slightly less mainstream than Garden State, but it holds up nearly as well. In the film, music plays an important role, both in terms of affect and in the subject matter. Songs on the soundtrack that I immediately remembered from the film were Barry Louis Polisar's "All I Want is You," the Kinks' "A Well Respected Man" (played as a theme for Michael Cera's character Paulie Bleeker) and the Moldy Peaches' "Anyone Else But You," which was both featured as background music and played as a duet by Cera and Page in the end of the film -- both versions are included on the soundtrack.\nFor someone like myself who isn't widely knowledgeable about music outside the mainstream, the Juno soundtrack still made for great listening. It's dominated by Kimya Dawson, who has five tracks as a solo artist and two with her band The Moldy Peaches. Anyone who saw the movie will instantly remember her folksy, acoustic-guitar songs with nearly spoken-word lyrics. After Dawson and the artists mentioned before, there's two songs by Belle & Sebastian, and the rest includes The Velvet Underground, Antsy Pants, Cat Power and Mateo Messina.\nAs a whole the soundtrack has an impressive flow -- no easy task for an album with artists so different from each other. Anyone already familiar with the artists or pleasantly surprised by a Wes Anderson soundtrack should definitely check out Juno. This is one group of songs that are great both as background music for the film and as a CD.