Jennifer’s Body (**3/4)

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.

IMDB link

Viewed 9/14/09 [screening at Ritz 5] and reviewed between then and 9/24/09

Let the Right One in (***)

It’s boy-meets-girl in this not-so-cuddly Swedish import, in which the main characters are two twelve-year-olds. Oskar, chosen victim of the school bully, wonders why his new friend Eli doesn’t know her birthday, why she doesn’t wear a jacket, and why she doesn’t like candy. He doesn’t pry too much, but we know better, having seen another of her kind dispatch one of the locals and drain his blood. I've never completely understood the enduring appeal of vampire movies, and can have trouble suspending my disbelief. I mean, if vampires were really roaming about Sweden, how come the country’s murder rate was so low? Yet this one draws you in as much with drama as horror.

The movie is not highly stylized, or particularly rich with vampire lore. I have no idea whether Eli is afraid of garlic. The minor characters—Oskar’s divorced parents, the older vampire, who may or may not be Eli’s father, the bully—barely register. What does is the wintry desolation of the setting, an apparently isolated town near the Soviet border, some time during the Brezhnev era. Not all of the scenes are in darkness, but nearly all evoke the mood of a lonely twelve-year-old. Like nearly any good vampire movie, the violence escalates, but it’s the mood that will haunt.

IMDB link

viewed 11/13/08 [screening at Ritz Bourse]; reviewed 11/18/08

30 Days of Night (**1/2)

What with vampires being so allergic to sunlight and all, why didn’t they think of this before? Head for Barrow, Alaska, where for a time (not actually 30 days, but never mind), the sun never comes up. That’s the premise of this graphic novel adaptation, which fancies Barrow as a tiny town of under 500 residents, most of whom split when the lights go out. The real Barrow’s population is close to 5000, mostly Eskimos. Maybe the vampires started off with ethnic cleansing, because everyone in town is white like the swirling snow that hinders the townfolk but later provides cover. The sheriff (Josh Hartnett) is the standard-issue leader type, and there’s a side plot where his ex-girlfriend (Melissa George) winds up sharing his space. Nothing like the threat of being bled dry to heal old wounds.

A lot of vampire movies romanticize their subjects, or at least give them a decent backstory. This is more like a zombie movie, though. True, the bloodsuckers are a lot smarter—we hear them scheme in their Eastern European voices (subtitled)—and stronger. But they seem to have few goals other than to wipe out the humans. Hence, as in many a zombie flick, the scared Barrowites who survive the initial massacre hole up in the buildings that they hope will provide the most protection, and the evildoers pick off the weak or unlucky. I kept wondering why it didn’t bother them to have all the blood dripping off their face; they just chow down and leave it there. Guess it looks all badass.

The setting is the one original element here, and more could have been done with that, like making some of the characters Inuit. You don’t get as much of a sense of everyone trying to wait out the days until daylight as I would have thought. It isn't as dark either; I guess all the events take place during the twilight that remains. I realize that it won’t do having it be pitch black the whole time, but a couple of scenes where the characters are truly blinded would have been scary. There’s more interest from a suspense standpoint than if the film is seen from a strict horror viewpoint. The ending, in which the gained knowledge of the vampires’ ways is used against them, is slightly above average, but the movie as a whole isn’t.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/26/07