
The Movie: Jennifer’s Body (opening September 18)
The Buzz: Diablo Cody follows her Oscar-winning Juno script with a horror flick about a high school she-beast who bangs boys and then devours them. Megan Fox continues to give entertainment journalists something to write about.
The Trailer:
The Review: Is anyone else confused by the near-ubiquity of Megan Fox? So she’s shown her cleavage in some dumb blockbusters and made “frank” comments about how crappy those blockbusters are… so what? Elizabeth Taylor hated on the campy, trashy BUtterfield 8 way back in 1960.Â
And so Megan Fox shares a boy-bait lesbian kiss with Amanda Seyfried in Jennifer’s Body. Again, so what?  Cruel Intentions was rocking that naughtily Sapphic vibe in 1999.
Yet to read most of the coverage she gets, you’d think Megan Fox was really fresh and original, and that people all over the nation are interested in her. My guess is that her “fame” and “notoriety” exist mostly in the media, and that very few people actually care about her as much as a the sixteen-point headlines insist that they do. I might be wrong, of course, but that’s my hunch.
I’m bringing this up because a lot of the pre-release writing about Jennifer’s Body focuses on Fox’s starring role, and that trailer up there certainly pimps her out.
Yet as it lingers over Fox’s rack, the trailer makes the film seem like it’s going to be the latest in an endless stream of cheapo splatter pictures featuring boob shots and generic hard rock songs.
In other words, the trailer makes Jennifer’s Body seem like yet another horror flick for teenage boys.
But the reason this movie interests me is that it’s written by Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama (Girlfight.) Their involvement suggests the film will have a witty, intelligently feminist take on horror tropes, the way that Slumber Party Massacre, written by Rita Mae Brown and directed by Amy Holden Jones, gorily sends up Jason Voorhies-style mayhem.Â
I still believe that Jennifer’s Body will be smarter than your average One Missed Call. I just wish that the trailer weren’t shaking my faith.
The Rating: 2 Hole Songs (because “Jennifer’s Body” is the name of a song on Live Through This. That can’t be an accident, right?)






3 responses so far ↓
1 katy // Aug 17, 2009 at 12:24 pm
I also am pretty unimpressed by Megan Fox … but I think, Mark — and I might be going out on a crazy limb here — that we may *not* be the demographic that makes up her core fan base. As fine an actress as no doubt she is, I think her appeal might be strongest with those who would list “wanting to get it on with girls” among their activities on Facebook.
And I think that this demographic might be the ones who are driving the intense media interest in her “freshness” and “originality” and “opinions on films” … and especially in her Sapphic naughtiness and her rack.
That said, I thought the trailer was funny, and I’ll follow Ms. Cody anywhere. I agree that it was a little Megan-centric. Actually, I am more of an Amanda Seyfried fan myself (Mean Girls, Veronica Mars) … and surely it is yet another sign of how insane Hollywood is that the absolutely smoking-hot Ms. Seyfried is playing the “geeky” and “awkward” girl in this film.
One encouraging thought might be that the film is more subversive than the trailer implies, and that it might be a more female-oriented story. In order to compensate for this, the studios play up Ms. Fox’s sex appeal to draw in the all-important young male audience. Or maybe not.
2 Dustin L // Aug 17, 2009 at 1:59 pm
I must say, as a straight guy, I also have absolutely no interest in Megan Fox. She’s too much of that mainstream porn star type, and I agree that her persona seems entirely media-created. Also, the “outspoken” stuff she’s said mostly seems pretty vacuous and unoriginal.
That said, I am curious to see this movie. Given the writer and director, it seems pretty likely to have something feminist to say, and obviously that’s not what the trailer’s going to focus on. It’s just designed to get the maximum number of horny teens into the theatre.
3 Mark Blankenship // Aug 17, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Hey Katy — Yeah, I’ll totally concede that I’m not in the Megan Fox target demographic… and I did wonder if they’re playing up the teen boy angle in the preview because the film itself takes such a different direction.
And I really am hoping that once I see the movie, it’ll turn out that the trailer doesn’t do it justice.
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