I watched Juno at a 10:05am Tremont Street showing, hoping I'd be the only person in the theatre. I was one of two. Roger Ebert and Andrew Sarris (yes, folks, the auteur of auteurism Andrew Sarris is still alive and you should be listening to him – just not this time) have claimed Juno is the best film of the year. It is not. Instead, if Dana Stevens' piece in slate.com is any guide, it seems that my reaction was similar to most viewers: the first 20-30 minutes of the film were practically unbearable, while the rest of the movie was a quiet pleasure. But that first 20-30 minutes! Given my cultural sympathies and aversions, I thought someone had gone out of their way to make me submit to cinematic hell. Juno (Ellen Page) is that non-existent teenager a certain class of thirty-somethings love to project all their hipness onto; sadly, she's the coolest high school-version of themselves they can imagine. Arch. Wry. Ironic. These words don't do justice to the absurdly truncated and supposedly hip teen-speak Juno is made to spit-out at every moment. Given the film's narrative, a defense could be mounted for the hyperbolic nature of the first 20-30 minutes. On this reading, Juno's way of talking is a defense against the complexities of life, and as she matures physically and emotionally throughout the pregnancy she progressively drops the hipster defense pose. Sentiment and substance replace ironic distance. I don't know if that reading is valid or grants the film's screenwriter too much credit, but I know I'm not buying it. The biggest problem with that line of argument is that it ignores that everyone in the movie talks like this for the first 20-30 minutes. But there is another issue here. By making Juno, specifically, talk like she does for that first section of the film, the screenwriter (Diablo Cody) lessens Juno's intelligence -- for would a teen as smart as Juno obviously is talk incessantly like Diablo writes? -- and denies the audience the pleasure of watching a whip-smart yet fragile teen drop the occasional liberating rhetorical flourish on unsuspecting adults and peers. She drowns Juno and the audience in quips rather than let Juno and the audience swim in that rough sea of high school life. Put another way, in those first 20-30 minutes Cody denies Juno her youth and the pleasures of transcending that youth during those brief, delicious moments of superiority certain high-schoolers seem to attain. Thankfully, this overbearing writing style gives way to something more generous and open.