At first everything coming out was glowing. It was a film festival darling. The buzz and hype machine started from there, culminating in an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and several major nominations for Ellen Page in the lead role of Juno.

Of course when something start to take on so much hype and momentum, eventually the backlash starts. For Diablo Cody, the woman who wrote Juno, and Juno that time is now. Currently people are arguing that without all the press talking about how Diablo Cody used to be a stripper and she used to write a sex blog on the internet, her movie wouldn't have gotten any attention. They're calling it a Dirty Cinderella Fairytale. And there are also of course the evitable screams that she's now sold out. Her next project is with Stephen Spielberg.

Let me stand back and ask you something? If Stephen Spielberg wanted to produce something you'd written, would you really tell the man no? I want you to think of what this could mean for your career as a writer. Do you want to be the one to say no to Stephen Spielberg? Or would you take the boost in career that will happen if you manage to write something at least passably decent?

What I think gets lost in the backlash and the hype is the movie itself. Is it the best movie I saw from last year? Honestly, no. That dubious award would probably go to the recreation of Hairspray. Does that mean that I think Juno is bad? No, not at all. It simply doesn't live up to its billing as "This Year's Little Miss Sunshine."

For those of you possibly not in the know, if you like sweet movies with warped dysfunctional but loving characters, and you can tolerate swearing, go rent Little Miss Sunshine now. I'll sit here and wait for you to get through watching it. No, I'm serious, if you haven't seen it, go see it. It's a real treat.

Have you watched it? Good. Now we can keep talking.

Part of my problem I feel with Juno is that I went in with all of these inflated expectations. I love Little Miss Sunshine so I was itching to see something that good again. 2007's movie selection really was rather weak. Juno is not Little Miss Sunshine.

I can see the parallels people were drawing. It's quirky. It has lovably dysfunctional characters. It has an amazing soundtrack. I say that assuming your music tastes roam into the kind of mellow, bizarre folky style. But the thing is, with Juno, it doesn't have the uplift and outright heart that Little Miss Sunshine does.

It's characters don't quite feel as real. Some people primarily in the backlash are blaming that on the weird diction choices and the sometimes a bit too stylized dialogue. I don't really think that's the problem. Nor do I understand the major hate for the style. No, normal teenagers don't talk like Juno. But I don't think that Diablo Cody thinks that teenagers really talk like that either.

She wasn't trying to make this giant touchtone movie for teenaged girls everywhere. If you want that kind of junk, turn on Lifetime, I'm sure you can find it. She was trying to tell a story. And in her story, in her world that she created, people talk in a kind of funny and witty sort of way There's a little thing called suspension of disbelief. Yes, "Honest to blog!" is cheesy. But you know what? It made me laugh, and that's what I think it was supposed to do.

That's another problem I think people have going into this. They take it too seriously. It's a comedy about a pregnant sixteen year old. No, teen pregnancy isn't a laughing matter. But once again this is a movie, a piece of art, not a public service announcement or afterschool special. No one is saying that you should go out and have unprotected sex and get pregnant to be like Juno. You have to take a step back. It's a situational comedy. Would there be anything interesting about it, if it was just about a sixteen year old living her normal life? Probably not. There has to be a conflict to make the movie interesting.

Maybe it's just me, but the first priority I have when I go see a movie, is that I want to go be entertained. I want to go in and for my hard earned money enjoy myself. This means that I don't always have the highest brow tastes, but it also means I don't generally have much of an ego about what I like and don't like.

As far as being entertaining, Juno was suitably entertaining. I walked out of the theater feeling like I'd just seen a good show. It made me laugh. It almost made me cry. I cared about the characters. And I loved the music, even if I didn't fully love the movie.

It was worth seeing. It was entertaining, but not enough to make me want to go out and buy it. Maybe in several years, when I've forgotten the finer points of it, I might rent it and brush back up on it, or maybe not.

Overall, I think what you have to do is go into it with an open mind. Forget the hype. Forget the reviews. Forget the backlash. Forget the life of the author. Just go in and take the movie at face value for what it is-- entertainment. This is good advice I feel for all movies not just this one. Life is too short to be pretentious on the side of hype or backlash.