Lol I promise that is the last non-Holy Week appropriate movie I will watch until after Easter. OTOH I did watch it last night. Anyways<\/em> this is a 2009 Karyn Kusama\/Diablo Cody joint about a best-friendship whose lowkey destructiveness turns highkey after one of the two friends gets turned into a succubus.<\/p>\n It\u2019s got so much going for it. I love any horror movie about friendship (Creep<\/em><\/a>, Let the Right One In<\/em><\/a>); I love especially when it\u2019s two girls; I love in a unique way when the friendship is already not great even before the horror starts happening. I love candy-colored semisubtle \u201980s homages and spooky fairy-tale woods. I love Veronica Mars<\/em> reunions. (Amanda Seyfried plays the nerdy friend, nicknamed \u201cNeedy\u201d because her BFF already kinda sucked even before she started going full cannibal, and Kyle Gallner shows up as a goth.) I love the song the movie is named after<\/a>! But I did not love Jennifer\u2019s Body<\/em>. It\u2019s very \u201calmost.\u201d YOU TRIED\u2026.<\/p>\n So, complaints. First of all, a lot of intriguing or at least quirky things happen and then never get brought up again. On the quirky side, Needy has a pet ferret in one scene but only for that one scene\u2013?? On the intriguing side, there\u2019s a mysterious fire which seems to be related somehow to Jennifer the Soon-to-Be-Succubus (Megan Fox), except it apparently is just a coincidence since nobody displays supernatural fire powers at any other point. There\u2019s a great scene where Succubus Jennifer is ready to tie a napkin beneath her chin and go to town on a football player, but he realizes that all the woodland creatures have gathered and are watching them mysteriously\/judgmentally. That\u2019s such an odd, funny, unnecessary moment. Never again does the movie hint at any connection between Jennifer\u2019s condition and animals\/nature! Why would you do these things?!<\/p>\n Second, lol Diablo Cody, come on. Maybe 10% of the compulsively quippy, reference-humor dialogue works. The most poignant dialogue is the simplest: \u201cI feel so empty right now.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re a jerk!<\/em>\u201d Fox and Seyfried convey a lot of real emotion in those lines, as well as the humor of them. They\u2019re good actresses when they\u2019re not made to say something rage-inducingly dumb! But Katharine Hepburn could not make a line like \u201cThat\u2019s freaktarded\u201d come across as anything other than self-conscious, gross, and insincere.<\/p>\n Third, and here I acknowledge that I\u2019m expressing more of a personal preference, I really didn\u2019t want their big break to come because of a boy. I know that teen girls often care about teen boys. Whatever!! I know, and this is a more-fun thing that the movie does do well, that teen girls\u2019 heterosexual relationships are sometimes about making a point to other girls. Jennifer and Needy communicate with one another by kissing (etc) boys, and that\u2019s interesting to me. But Needy\u2019s boyfriend played too big a role in this movie\u2013he\u2019s fine, he\u2019s whatever, why are we seeing so much of him?? Jennifer makes a sexual\/cannibalistic play for him, and that\u2019s the catalyst for the friends\u2019 big showdown\u2026 yawn tbqh. There\u2019s something insistently heteronormative about this movie, which made even the quite intense scene where Jennifer and Needy kiss feel very not-lesbian, at least in retrospect. Very \u201cwe can put this shot in the trailer.\u201d In the scene itself, I was right there with Jennifer and Needy, but when it turned out to be another one-scene ferret, with no consequences, no soul-searching, Needy just immediately goes back to macking with her boredude, it felt overly self-aware: We should have a lesbian kissing scene, so here it is. Megan Fox lesbian liplock!!!!<\/p>\n I guess what I\u2019m trying to say is that I wanted their character arc, the catastrophic breakup of their friendship, to be more thoroughly centered on them<\/em> and not on this dude.<\/p>\n It kills me because this movie attempts something no other film I know of has really tried. The intense focus on the best-friendship rather than the friendship group separates it from Heathers<\/em> (in spite of my snotty post title) and The Craft<\/em> as well as the underrated, lilting Sisterhood of Night<\/em><\/a>. The horror-comedy separates it from Heavenly Creatures<\/em>, plus also, I just wanted a cheesy monster movie about this, alongside the more realistic and artistic films like Creatures<\/em>. The closest comparison to what I wanted here is probably Ginger Snaps<\/em><\/a>, which is smart and funny and monsterous, but the fact that the girls in Ginger<\/em> are sisters takes away some of the edge of their intensely intertwined relationship. Making them best friends\u2013people who chose one another, and now have to live or die with that choice\u2013ah, I\u2019d watch that movie five times a day.<\/p>\n The movie this movie wanted to be still hasn\u2019t been made.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lol I promise that is the last non-Holy Week appropriate movie I will watch until after Easter. OTOH I did watch it last night. Anyways this is a 2009 Karyn Kusama\/Diablo Cody joint about a best-friendship whose lowkey destructiveness turns highkey after one of the two friends gets turned into a succubus. It\u2019s got so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[56,32,119],"class_list":["post-13676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-friendship","tag-gayer-than-a-picnic-basket","tag-horror"],"yoast_head":"\n