Juno at the Big Picture

The best part about The Big Picture was not eating popcorn from a Veuve Clicquot bucket, or the bar. The best part was listening to the two older couples behind us, who couldn't have been happier with having wine in their seats: "I can't wait to tell everyone that I saw a movie at El Gaucho and drank wine!"

The only real negative: the sound system isn't as good as the rest of the theater's presentation, especially during the too-loud "how to rent this theater" promos that show just before the film.

We can't agree with Seattlest Katie's assessment that "Juno is perfect," but it's the first Diablo Cody experience that hasn't left us wishing she'd stop striving so mightily to achieve nonchalant cool. Yes, Diablo, you're cool (as cool as a regular Entertainment Weekly columnist can be, anyway) -- can you stop calling attention to the hamburger phone and get on with the story, please?

As noted elsewhere, once the film stops freebasing leftover slang shaken loose from Buffy novelizations and Veronica Mars fanfic and starts telling the story through believable characters speaking in their own distinctive voices, it gets pretty good pretty fast. When Jezebel and the US Council of Catholic Bishops both adore your film, you done good.

We can tell we're settling into parenthood, though. As much as we felt for Juno and Bleeker (and Mark, the Jason Bateman character, for that matter), it was J.K. Simmons as her gruffly affectionate father who got us to cry.

Here's hoping the people behind us didn't notice our own nonchalant cool melting away.