When I first saw Juno, my eyes rolled around so hard in my head I thought they’d shootout my body. The pacing was boring and slow, the character world and speak was ridiculous, and the references to Argento and company seemed sacrilage. But what did I know? Juno won the best script at the Oscars. Now, at the end of Jennifer’s Body’s opening weekend, all the criticism I listed above for Juno is suddenly being applied to JB. And I disagree.

The story begins with Anita “Needy” Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried) locked away in a mental institute, who acts are our reminescent narrator to share the story of how she came to be in the psyche ward. She’s obviously a fighter – and a kicker – and from this opener on, I decided Needy was alright.

So back in Needy’s former life, she was a hottie-in-disguise, caring little about fashion and hiding behind ugly sweaters, tortoiseshell lenses, and the security of her sweet and caring boyfriend, Chip (Johnny Simmons). Megan Fox plays as Jennifer, Needy’s heterosexual lifemate. While Chip and Needy are adorable, the real love story, it’s clear, is between Jennifer and Needy, who have one of those weird, completely obsessive friendships that girls sometimes get. Where they practically (or occasionally literally as happens in this movie) have ESP with each other. A love story that spawned from the playground sandbox, these two are so involved in each other’s lives they can predict each other’s actions and speak in their own special BFF code – much to the chagrin of Chip, who finds their girl-speak (read: Diablo Cody speak) annoying.

And while we see that Needy too clearly finds some aspects of Jennifer annoying, we also see that, as is the real-life case with many frienemies, Needy likes the excitement of having Jennifer around. Melee occurs when Needy blows off a night with Chip to go on a girl-date with Jennifer to see an indie band named Low Shoulder “from the city!” play at a local dive. Chip mocks her for bending to Jennifer’s whim, but Needy preens in front of the mirror, choosing her outfit (per Jennifer’s orders), with more care than she did when meeting up with Chip.

Shit hits the fan pretty soon after the two arrive at the bar. The bar burns to the ground (a scene surely unsettling to other Rhode Islanders), and Low Shoulder kidnaps Jennifer in their creepy band van. When Jennifer shows up at Needy’s house later that night, we get the story, and director Karyn Kusama’s first attempt at horror in the movie.

Things go from bad to worse at school, when boys start getting offed. For those who are going to Jennifer’s Body to only see a horror movie, you will be disappointed. The trailer, and even that sentence “boys start getting offed” is misleading if you’re expecting a high body count. Or to see any on-screen gore.

Our second act plods around a little bit. Low Shoulder, the indie band, becomes huge due to a Heathers-inspired turn of events (among other things). Their song “Through the Trees” is the biggest thing since “Teenage Suicide: Don’t Do It!” If only we had jocks as hilarious and hateable as Kurt and Ram to have killed instead of Jennifer’s Body’s football players…

Due to some LIBRARY RESEARCH!!! (”Our library has an occult section?” “It’s, um, really small.”) Needy figures out what’s probably going on with Jennifer, and sets out to stop her before her life – and Chip’s – gets ripped to pieces. Messy pieces. “Lasagna with teeth” pieces.

So that being said, as a movie, Jennifer’s Body does drag. In my mind, it suffers from the same pacing disasters as Juno, getting too wrapped up in the nuances of the world that it forgets that it needs action to push things along. When the action does come, there’s just no excuse for an R-rated movie to show so many shadows of attacks, rather than the actual meat of things, or do so many quick cutaways. Perhaps this was the danger of going with a director who’s background is The “L” Word and Girlfight rather than someone with more of an eye for gore. I think if we’d been given a couple of heavier scare scenes, a lot of the pessimism for this movie would disappear.

Obviously, as mentioned before, this is not all groundbreaking territory. Aside from Heathers, genre viewers may think of the movie sort of like if Ginger Snaps, but with well-adjusted teens, not the black-clad, morbid sisters of the werewolf movie. A scene in our climax involving a ridiculous puffy gown, with a running heroine and rocking guitar also reminded me of 28 Days Later’s “In-the-house-in-a-heartbeat” climax.

So why did I like this movie?

Jennifer and Needy’s relationship is just so good, such a breath of air in a movie-year that’s been mostly about the action, and not about the players, that I couldn’t help enjoy myself. Also, while there are some clunkers, there are also enough dry-remarks and laughs that really hit it out of the park. But this is NOT a horror comedy. It’s actually sort of just a weird little story with strange, pretty characters that terrible things happen to. Needy’s reactions vary from blase to horrified, and the blase note is where the comedy comes in.

Personally, I’d like Cody to try her hand at horror again, with a genre director, and a story that takes place over maybe the timespan of a few days or a week – not a meandering school semester. Because I was surprised to find that Jennifer’s Body was actually pretty good.

Tags: Jennifer's Body

This entry was posted by fallon on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.