'Jennifer's Body.' Don't Believe All the Bad Hype

For a moment, folks, can we forget that Juno scribe Diablo Cody or perceived celebrity tramp Megan Fox has anything at all to do with “Jennifer’s Body?” For whatever reasons those two come with so much preconceived baggage that it seems to me that a lot of people can’t get around that and watch the movie with an unbiased eye. One of the reasons that I believe that is because I have never seen Megan Fox in a movie before “Jennifer’s Body” (Yah, I’m a geek but not a masochist. I dislike Michael Bay’s style – nothing personal) and I caught Juno during its early run, so that was before whatever caused the Diablo Cody backlash; and I liked “Jennifer’s Body.” I read on a blog not long ago something that I think is profound with regard to today’s fandom. I wish I could attribute it to the right source, but alas I can’t remember from whence it came. I think it was a sports blog and it went something like this: “Today’s fan is much more concerned with what to hate then what they love.” I think that fits with Fox and Cody pretty well.

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For a guy, “Jennifer’s Body” is a slightly difficult movie to completely Get. I think one of the other problems with the movie’s lack of momentum at the box office other than extreme hate towards the writer and one of the stars, it that it was marketed terribly. This is not an adult horror movie, but is rather a teenage relationship and high school movie that happens to feature a succubus as the antagonist. It is also not Megan Fox’s movie, but rather Amanda Seyfried’s (Needy) as Jennifer’s “BFF” and Johnny Simmons (Cliff) as Needy’s boyfriend. “Jennifer’s Body” is not that different from Mean Girls or Thirteen or in some ways Clueless. Also I believe the R rating was a mistake. This is definitely a soft R rating and could have used a promotion that steered it more towards the PG-13 camp and to have been targeted more towards girls than boys.

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Jennifer’s relationship with Needy and sympathy for the popular girl come into play more and more as the movie progresses. When juxtaposed against the relationship between the demon Jennifer and the suddenly rebelling Needy, some things about ‘need’ start to become clear. In fact, I would say the name ‘Needy’ is an attempt at a Dickensesque cue from Cody and the key to much of the movie. It is supposed to be obvious that Needy needs Jennifer and goes out of her way to maintain the friendship; but it becomes just as obvious that Jennifer needs Needy as a person that, while in many ways supplicant, also associates with Jennifer outside the realm of objectification.

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The cinematography and direction in “Jennifer’s Body has a few worthwhile flourishes. Some of the scenes lend a creepy atmosphere. On a more subtle note, the contrast of colors both muted and saturated are fun to look out for. Like in the scene with Jennifer walking down the hall of a mourning school as pictured above right. The contrast as a vibrant and colorful Jennifer walks through the dull grayness of the woefully grieving school is a fun contrast. There is no mastery behind the lens, but there is a sense of fun and style which fits this Cody penned script well.

The one clunky part of the movie is the forced and trite dialog. Pretentious popular vernacular and snappy pop-dense rants were fun in “Clueless,” charming in “Juno,” the point in Wodehouse, but amazingly contrived and ultimately annoying in “Jennifer’s Body.” I don’t know if that is how teens today – either rural, suburban, or both – talk, but if it is to some degree I can’t imagine that it is with such gleeful gluttony. The zippy conversations sound like something Kevin Williamson would write if he was an android pretending to be a teenage girl a thousand years in the future using today’s urban dictionary as a reference. Nothing about it sounds realistic, but I guess neither does a teenage succubus.

Read the full review + media at the link!