I don't know what crawled up everyone's ass around the time this movie was released, but before I knew it, suddenly everyone was talking about how horrible and cliche it was. I was intrigued by the movie's premise and I love Amanda Seyfried, so I bought the DVD as soon as it was released, but I got distracted by bright shiny objects and so I waited around a long time to watch it. I finally got to it today, and while it might not be the most original movie I've ever seen, I loved it.
First off, Megan Fox is gorgeous in this movie, so she's nice to look at, and second, she actually does a good job playing her part. She's the ditzy popular girl who is best friends with a nerd aptly named "Needy" (right, Amanda Seyfried plays the unattractive friend here in bizarro land). Jennifer manages to be a cocky bitch while also being likable enough for me to care what happens to her (mostly because Needy is such a nice best friend that I feel bad when her life starts falling apart, starting with her friendship with Jennifer). Not to spoil anything, but Jennifer goes from regular high school evil to actually, truly evil when she is possessed by a demon and starts snacking on the student body. The trailers and movie posters give that much away, but they didn't prepare me for how much I was going to enjoy the show. While the screenwriter for this movie, Diablo Cody, can sometimes get caught up enjoying the sound of her own dialogue too much (and it's not always as clever as she thinks it is, honest to blog) the dialogue in this movie is still a lot of fun. Jennifer makes some good comebacks both before and after she turns evil, and while I'm fairly certain teenage girls don't call each other "Monistat" and "Vagisil," it's still kind of fun to hear Jennifer and Needy say it.
The movie is pretty mean-spirited, too. What I mean when I say that is it's not all cut and dried, the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys all have pointy black hats and horns, the bad stuff happens but it isn't TOO bad, and the good guys defeat the evil in the end by virtue of their goody goodness. In "Jennifer's Body," evil can sometimes be very seductive, and good can be easily tainted by evil until it's hard to tell the difference anymore.
Plenty of nice gore (I recommend watching the uncut version, because I imagine the theatrical version is more tame), good acting, characters that you care about, and some fun and nasty dialogue make this a helluva fun movie to watch. I don't know why so many people hated it, but I totally dug it.
No comments:
Post a Comment