In Defense of Jennifer’s Boobies

Dear fellow male critics, I just don’t understand you sometimes.

Hating on a movie in which these two lovely ladies make out in extreme closeup? Really?

I hate to be presumptuous here, but is everyone dissing this movie just so lucky in love that they’ve never had a boner they didn’t know what to do with? So picky that you find flaws with the way Megan Fox looks? Or just at such an intellectual remove that movies are always assessed by the upper head, and disassociated completely from that secondary one in your pants?

Gay male critics are excluded…as one of them specifically pointed out to me via Twitter…but y’know, I don’t care much when Aaron Eckhart takes his shirt off either, and yet I noted it in my review of LOVE HAPPENS because I get that it’s one thing people will like if they’re into dudes.

If you intellectualize JENNIFER’S BODY too much you won’t like it, because I don’t think everything in it actually makes sense. If you go just to have fun, I think you’re the kind of audience member the filmmakers wanted. Are you ready to cheer when Megan Fox eats some dude’s guts and then struts away to heavy guitar strains in the soundtrack? No? Jeez, when did everyone start sounding so OLD? I may have a handful of white hairs in my beard these days, but I still like it in movies when shit blows up, people get gutted, and chicks get me hard. Why do I feel like such a loner on this score?

So let me cut to the chase. Does Megan get naked? Not exactly – you can see more of her nude body just by google-searching for those leaked set photos. But with rear shots of her skinny -dipping, ample cleavage, and non-nipple-proof shirts, there are enough pieces here to put the full mental picture together. As for Amanda Seyfried, just side-boobage…rent ALPHA DOG if you really wanna see something from her.

But the movie is also honest about sexuality in ways others or not…I cannot offhand think of another horror flick that so blatantly deals with the very real awkwardness of a guy fumbling to “put it in” for the first time. Or that’s as open about the occasional issues of orientation-confusion,as per the Kinsey scale. Is it doing them to a serious, point-making end? Not really, but it helps ground things in an emotional reality, even as the story is clearly not set in a particularly realistic world.

Then there’s the whole issue of the “trademark” smartass dialogue by Brook “Diablo Cody” Busey. I’m loath to actually cry sexism on this one, because she did milk the whole stripper/suicide girl image all the way to the bank. (Can you imagine a guy boasting about his male-stripping exploits and riding THAT visual to the top of the Oscar chain? I’m having trouble doing so.) But there does seem to be a hatred for Brook that isn’t apparent for, say, Joss Whedon, whose teen-speak rings even more like a smartass older dude imagining what kids say.

I wasn’t fond of the “home-skillet” stuff in JUNO. And I said so when JUNO came out. It’s out of my system. Assess each movie by itself, sez me. And I have far less problem with hipper-than-thou phraseology coming from the mouth of a bitchy, too-perfect cheerleader we’re meant to hate than from a sensitive pregnant chick we’re supposed to adore. It is, we must note, not up to the standard set by Daniel Waters in HEATHERS (full disclosure: I know Dan and like him, and think SEX AND DEATH 101 is pretty astute about the LA dating scene) — “You’re lime-green jello and you can’t even admit it to yourself” is no “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw.” But the mere fact that it’s aspiring to be in the same ballpark deserves a pat on the back, I think.

(To be fair, though, I sometimes think “Diablo” doesn’t always realize that certain lines work better on the page than actually spoken. “Why does it smell like Thai food…were you guys PHUK-ing?” only works as a visual pun where you can see the joke in the spelling.)

Amanda Seyfried plays a character named Anita Lesnicky, which can be easily abbreviated to “Needy Les”…the first part of that is her nickname outright, the rest just not-so-slightly implied. We begin the movie with her in a mental institution as she flashes back to events involving Jennifer Check (Megan Fox, finally unleashing the smart mouth we’ve only seen in interviews until now), which I think is the movie’s biggest mistake, as it tells us right off the bat who survives and what the general outcome was. It also provides an excuse for unnecessary voice-over, which allows Brook to overindulge. Yet we should not forget that the actual director of this flick is Karyn Kusama. I haven’t seen her GIRLFIGHT, which clearly played around with gender roles, but I did see AEON FLUX, which is half-brilliant and half-terrible…JENNIFER’S BODY is more like an averaged score versus AF’s high-highs and low-lows.

Needy and Jennifer have a psychic connection that I don’t think is ever explained, which is arguably the movie’s second biggest mistake, though if this were a Japanese movie it’d be matter of fact, like in RINGU, where some characters are psychic just because (wise move not using that in the U.S. remake). There are flashbacks to the two of them as children playing in a sandbox, and one of them gets cut and the other licks the blood…but last time I checked, that doesn’t make you psychic. Then again, last time I checked, accidentally sacrificing a non-virgin to Satan doesn’t turn her into a virtually unkillable succubus either. And yes, that’s what happens to Jennifer.

Said sacrifice occurs after Jennifer and Needy go see a big-city band at a local dive bar, and the place ends up burning down, killing many. This proves to be the springboard for a whole subtext invoking 9-11 and societal reaction to tragedy, both real (a “9-11″ beverage features two side-by-side shot-glass “towers” filled with red, white, and blue liquor) and unreal (the way mounting body counts in slasher movies often traumatize a community far less than analogous real-life murders would). As part of a pact with Satan, the band milks the tragedy Toby-Keith style with a tribute song.

What they don’t realize is that their sacrifice is now back and hungry…Jennifer needs to eat people or she’ll become ugly (“ugly for her”). And Needy, having the psychic connection, feels every murder and tastes every kiss. It flows both ways, and badly, when Jennifer starts feeling Needy’s desire for the same boyfriend, the hapless Chip (Johnny Simmons). Or is Jennifer just being a bitch? Li’l o’ both, probably.

Plus there’s that makeout scene I mentioned upfront. HOTT.

Overall, it’s very reminiscent of all the horror I used to watch on HBO in the ’80s. Stuff like The Blob remake, Brain Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, House, The Horror Show, Pumpkinhead…I don’t think it’s trying to subvert that kind of movie, which is what people seem to have been hoping for. It’s trying to BE that kind of movie. Yes, the characters now have cell phones, and the band is emo rather than hair metal, but Seyfried and Simmons are still too impossibly, unrealistically beautiful to be the school nerds (not to mention school nerds rarely get laid, except in movies). No, it isn’t an especially frightening movie, but its casual attitude towards acts of depravity makes for a weirdly disturbing, detached atmosphere that I like. And this is the sort of movie that expects you to appreciate a Lance Henriksen cameo.

It is indeed an odd contradiction for a scribe of ironic dialogue to try and craft a movie that’s so non-ironically genre…and yes, there are some kinks that could have been ironed out. But JENNIFER’S BODY first and foremost is meant to be FUN — fun for high-schoolers, not detached intellectuals — and on that score, it’s a winner.