What both of the following movies share in common is voice-over narration, flashbacks and references to
Hannah Montana and social networking sites. Normally those are bad signs, but good use is made of them all. Whether you're expecting greatness or you've already been turned off by other critics, both movies are still
better than you'd think.
Jennifer's Body (two stars total) is like a foreign film, where you come out feeling like something got
lost in translation. I kept thinking, "if I were a girl, I'd laugh more, or be more scared, or understand the significance of any of this." The first five minutes seemed familiar enough (suburban setting, school next to scary woods, someone standing right outside the window). The next fifty minutes seemed convinced that recent trends like monsters with big mouths (
I Am Legend, 2007 and
The Unborn, 2009) and projectile-vomiting black stuff (
District 9, 2009 and
Trick 'r Treat, 2007) are scary. They're not. Guys who make it that far probably do so only to see Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried kiss. If they leave right after, they miss the best part. The song "867-5309/Jenny" has always sounded disturbing to me, but when a Satanic indie rock band sings it during the attempted ritual sacrifice of Megan Fox (right next to the best place to dispose of a murder weapon - and the town's namesake), it gains all new meaning. As much as I laughed at the "school library occult section" joke following that, I was seriously interested in the concept of
succubi and the convenient research backing it up. Writer Diablo Cody annoys me with her constant abbreviations (I've also read her column in
Entertainment Weekly magazine), but I'll credit her here with teaching me the word "freaktarded," which happens to be a great description of this movie.
Zombieland (four stars total) works best if watched as a metaphor for growing up. In fact, my main reason for watching it was to see how
Little Miss Sunshine Abigail Breslin would act in a horror movie, but then it turned out not to be a horror movie. If you don't buy that it's a
coming-of-age story, please, just don't call it a horror-comedy. Perhaps you already saw it as a road comedy but it's actually closer to some dark, action-packed, buddy comedy. Times two. With baseball bats, machine guns and toilet lids. The soundtrack took me back to junior high, when we cruised around to Metallica and Van Halen (both featured in the movie). Nowadays kids may do the same, but to The Black Keys and The Raconteurs (also featured). Either way the story's all about scoring a set of wheels and then convincing some girls to stick around for the whole ride. I've never been impressed with Jesse Eisenberg's angst schtick (not even in
Adventureland), but then he flipped this clever script with such unimpressed angst, he singlehandedly kept the whole movie from going over the top. He wasn't my favorite actor though, neither Woody Harrelson nor the
surprise guest. That honor goes to Emma Stone (from
Superbad), who played a bad girl without a sex scene. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, this is a coming-of-age/horror movie without any sex, just gratuitous violence.
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