[Movies] Jennifers Body 2009 HDRip

What is Jennifer's Body, and what is it supposed to be about? I don't know, and the film doesn't seem to, either: It's not really a horror movie, because those are usually scary. Nor is it smart or self-aware enough to be a treatise on teenage girls or male fears of female sexuality. And it's not even a swing-for-the-fences, spectacular enough failure to be a death knell or even deconstruction of the severely limited appeal of either its star, Megan Fox, or its screenwriter, Diablo Cody. Jennifer's Body substitutes hipster credibility for emotional currency, confuses pop-psychology insight with substantive social commentary, and measures terror on a scale that ranges from the word boo to a dead spider; in short, Jennifer's Body just does not work.

Fox plays Jennifer, a sexpot alpha female who mercilessly presides over the boys in her high school, but only has affection for her childhood friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried). After the two of them narrowly escape a fire while attending the concert of an up-and-coming band, Jennifer takes off to parts unknown in the lead singer's tour van, only to turn up later that night ravenously hungry in Needy's kitchen, covered in blood and God knows what else. It turns out that Jennifer has been mysteriously turned into a literal man-eater, and subsequently decides that her male classmates will serve as a more than suitable smorgasbord for her feasting pleasure. But when the homicidal homecoming queen decides that Needy's boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) is next on the menu, her mousy friend musters all of her own inner strength and decides to take Jennifer down a peg or two, even if it comes at the expense of their friendship, or even their lives.

Fans of horror will be immediately disappointed by its coy approach to either visceral or atmospheric scares; there's nothing in the film that more than momentarily shocks, the gore factor is minimal, and quite frankly the only thing resembling a "disturbing" sequence is the make out session between Fox and Seyfried, specifically because it comes out of nowhere and has no real purpose. But in general, there's just no strong throughline of action or emotion or anything else; it's as if just because there were enough moments of trailer-worthy cleverness that the rest was never fleshed out. Ok, so hell is a teenage girl. If you really envy somebody you're lime green jell-o. If you're amateurish or immature you're J.V. (as opposed to varsity). And Jennifer is evil, not just high school evil. But what happens in between these expository, pointedly hip or "deeply" metaphorical lines that is remotely compelling?

What's actually interesting is how all of the film's shortcomings seem to dovetail into one another, starting with Diablo Cody's script. Truth be told, I was sick of Cody's cooler-than-thou smarm before Juno had even reached its halfway point, but here she's empowered by the self-importance of her Oscar win, and indulges every pop-culture reduction she possibly can shoehorn into a given scene. In the same way that Tarantino has occasionally transformed his soapbox into superficial "characterizations," or Mamet's formalized gibberish has sometimes revealed a less than grandiose execution, Cody's verbiage serves as a stand-in for actual storytelling and character development; unlike her predecessors, however, that facility with language is the only talent she seems to possess, unless a false sense of superiority counts. The movie dotes on how clever it is without bothering to try and be smart, leaving its infinitely more interesting ideas stranded without more meaningful examination.