Q: On the strength of your naming "Juno" the best film of the year, I just took it in at my local googleplex, and I was a tad disappointed, even though I largely agree with your review. I was distracted to the point of annoyance at the implausibly hipper-than-thou sentences zipping out of the lips of the movie's characters. Juno is hip. Juno's friends are hip. Juno's parents are hip. Even Rainn Wilson's character, the guy behind the counter at the store, is hip. Only Jason Bateman's and Jennifer Garner's characters seem to be spared this indignity, probably to make some obscure point about the evils of yuppiehood.

A wise reviewer once wrote: "I have a problem with movies where everybody talks as if they were reading out of an old novel about a bunch of would-be colorful characters. They usually end up sounding silly." Well, of course that reviewer was you, and the movie was "Raising Arizona." So can you explain why the affected English bothered you in one but not the other?
C. Morris, Noblesville, Ind.

A. Your local "googleplex"? We discourage that kind of hip coinage around here. Isn't "movie theater" good enough? Although you have caught me in a contradiction, I would argue that the dialogue in "Juno" mostly works because Ellen Page sells the tone so convincingly. She wins us over. Think of Diablo Cody's words in the mouths of Page's contemporaries, and you cringe. Yes, her parents talk that way: Where do you think she learned it? As for the drugstore clerk and Juno's best girlfriend, it's as if she affects the linguistic weather when she enters a room.

And here is Felix Vasquez of the Bronx, N.Y.: "This movie has divided audiences around the Internet. Some love its cute and intelligent way of addressing teen pregnancy, while others hate the pop culture quip-dialogue and put Diablo Cody through the wringer for it. Yet they never seem to complain when Tarantino or Kevin Smith use the exact same sense of dialogue."