Screenwriters are the unsung heroes of the film world. Directors usually get the credit for a film’s success. But Diablo Cody is the exception to that rule. Maybe it was the weird name, maybe the stripper background, maybe her slangy teen-speak that helped her parlay a single produced screenplay into an Oscar, an Entertainment Weekly column, a Showtime series (The United States of Tara) and celebrity status befitting a starlet. So this, her follow-up cinematic effort (directed by Girlfight’s Karyn Kusuma) will probably garner this movie a little more attention that a genre flick like this might otherwise get. It fuses the high school drama with a teen horror film, and like Juno features a troubled teen girl at its center.
The troubled one is played by Amanda Seyfried, who gives a versatile performance starting with the opening, in which she's a very angry asylum inmate. We see her two-month journey from halter-topped good girl to orange-jump-suited badass. Semi-mean girl Jennifer, played by Transformers fox Megan Fox, is her BFF who truly transforms after an elaborate accident involving a bar, a band, and flirty banter. An unfortunate, bloody encounter brings out the diablo in Jennifer and, as often happens in this sort of movie, only her BFF can see it. (This requires you to believe that the police and almost everyone else are idiots.) Lots of guys want Jennifer’s body, and, after the accident, she wants theirs, though not quite in the same way.
Diablo’s hand is apparent in some of the dialogue, like the way the two girls refer to attractive guys as “salty,” and a few other elements stick out as original, like the application of the Faust legend to the indie rock band. (Seems it’s devilishly difficult to make it in today’s music scene.) The uneven relationship between the two girls is also a subtext. The scary parts are scary enough, the funny parts are funny enough, but nothing more. Jennifer’s Body would like to be the Heathers of the 2000s, or something along that line, but it’s not even up to the level of World’s Greatest Dad in satirizing high schoolers’ shallowness. Still, you could do worse if light horror is your thing.
Viewed 9/14/09 [screening at Ritz 5] and reviewed between then and 9/24/09
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