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.

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

The Rocker (**3/4)

Comfortably crafted to appeal to both classic-rock-loving baby boomers and their teen progeny, this comic vehicle for Office worker Rainn Wilson features the NBC star as a once-promising drummer who gets a second chance. Dumped by his band (think of an American Def Leppard) on the verge of stardom, Robert “Fish” Fishman doesn’t like the office, or his job, so much and winds up at his sister’s house when he loses it. Lo and behold, his nephew and a couple of high school friends have a fledgling band. The rest follows in a pattern too familiar to make the movie stand out, the central joke being that Fish is the least mature of the group, longing to trash hotel rooms and emulate rock stars of the pre-Bono era. The comedy benefits from Wilson’s physicality and some good lines given to the band’s crass manager (Jason Sudeikis). Among the kids, Emma Stone stands out as the tough-but-tender guitarist.

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reviewed 8/19/08

Control (***)

Some lives are easier to understand than others, and the life of a introvert who committed suicide at 23, in May 1980, doesn’t present the most obvious dramatic arc. Ian Curtis was the singer in Joy Division, a UK band whose music may be best known to Americans, especially those under 40, via the version of “Shadowplay” by the Killers that plays over the closing credits here. The song, whose lyrics talk about “acting out your own death,” was a moderate hit on the rock charts and made #68 on the Hot 100.

Curtis (Sam Riley) obviously saved a lot of his words for his songs. He wasn’t flamboyant, and his stage mannerisms can be called dorky. His childhood was apparently ordinary enough to be left out of the film. Despite his affection for the punk rock scene that inspired Joy Division, he didn’t try very hard to act out the rock-star lifestyle. In one of the earliest scenes, a high school teacher catches him daydreaming, but he merely apologizes. Later, he walks around with the word “Hate” written on his jacket, but he’s still mild-mannered enough to were a tie during his day job helping the unemployed, and traditional enough to propose to his teen sweetheart, Debbie (Samantha Morton).

In the end it’s the intensity of the character and the crisp black-and-white cinematography used by Anton Corbijn that hold your attention. Riley, who’d barely acted before this, turns out to both look and sound a lot like Curtis, judging by the video clip on the DVD, and he and the other actors do an entirely credible job re-creating the band’s performances. Corbijn doesn’t dig into Joy Division’s actual music-making process and only barely portrays the Manchester scene that the band grew out of. (For more on that, see 24 Hour Party People, about the indie-music impresario Tony Wilson, who would give Joy Division its record contract. Craig Parkinson plays Wilson here.) But there are several performance scenes, and my guess is that if you don’t care for the band’s droning brand of post-punk, you’ll like this significantly less. (This is in contrast to Corbijn and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh’s subsequent collaboration, Nowhere Boy, which has more of a story and can easily be enjoyed whether or not you care for John Lennon’s music.)

The film suggests Curtis’s epilepsy diagnosis, or the medication he took for it, as fuel for his apparent depression. But in the end his descent is of course not entirely rational, and we see it much through the eyes of Morton’s Debbie (whose book was the basis for the film), who is the most sympathetic character. On Curtis’s tombstone, Debbie had the title of Joy Division’s sole (post-suicide) UK smash, “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” The lyrics suggest his state of mind:

You cry out in your sleep,
All my failings exposed.
And there’s a taste in my mouth,
As desperation takes hold.

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viewed 1/31/11 and 2/1/11 on DVD [Netflix] abnd reviewed 2/4/11

Light of Day (**3/4)

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