Jennifer's Body was a bummer. I mean wettie-killer.

This movie should have been awesome!

Like many feminist blog readers and pop-culture junkies, Kelsey and I have been following the hype on Jennifer’s Body , starring Megan Fox as a cheerleader-turned-flesh-eating-demon and Amanda Seyfried as her loyal but mousier (Hollywood mousier) BFF, since we watched the preview way back in July. We finally got a chance to see it this Monday, and while hate is a strong word, there was one too many WTF? moments (“867-5309”?!) for us to get a feminist buzz off this flick (especially after being surprisingly touched by Whip It preview). So like the vlogging pioneers we strive to be (did you know we have a video page?) we sat down moments after the credits rolled to give our impressions, which include a primer on Diablo Cody’s latest vernacular additions (:30), why we were disappointed (1:13), and of course its redeeming qualities (What? Unlike some people–JENNIFER!–we’re not all filled with black bile and bloodlust. 4:19)! Check ‘er out and share your own spoiler-filled thoughts on the movie!

KW: Alright I’m Kelsey and
KJ: I’m Kjerstin
KW: Kjerstin and I just saw Jennifer’s body. First of all, did you like the movie?
KJ: No. I didn’t. I thought it was really bad
KW: Thumbs up or down? What would you–?
KJ: I would have to do two thumbs down.
KW: I would also give it two thumbs down.
KJ: It’s not just a feminist thumbs down, it’s like a… movie thumbs down.
KW: My feminist thumb and movie going thumb are both down.

**

KW: Let’s talk a little bit about some of the slang we learned. Diablo Cody is queen of slang terms that to0 cool for school teens like to use to each other.
KJ: there’s salty.
KW: Salty means that a boy is cute. I had never heard it before. To all you salty fellas out there…
KJ: “Jello,”… but I say that.
KW: “jello” if you’re jealous. You do say that?
KJ: “gummer”.
KW: “gummer” was like somebody kind of a who’s a hick or a loser
KJ: And the best one was “wettie”.
KW: Yeah. If you have a vagina and you get turned on by something you have a total wettie.

**

KW: I’ll start by saying one of the reasons I’m disappointed is that I had high hopes for the movie.
KJ: I didn’t have high hopes but it got talked up a lot about being like, a revamped horror flick…like, she eats boys! Like that’s feminist, right? Like… killing boys.
KW: Right. “She’s feminist.” And there were these interviews with Diablo Cody, who wrote the script for the movie–
KJ: Right and Diablo Cody’s like this edgy ….
KW: Right and she’s like “ohh–
KJ: …that really edgy film about the pregnant girl? I don’t’ know if you guys saw that…
KW: I don’t know I guess I will say it was nice to see a female friendship at the forefront of the plot of the movie but–
KJ: that’s true, seeing any female-centered… both the villain and protagonist were…
KW: …were girls. So it passed the Bechdel test. At one point, by the swimming pool, she [Jennifer] has just murdered a really cute high school boyfriend [Chip]. Then Needy says, “Is it just because of your insecurities..”, and that was maybe the only point where I was like, “Oh they’re trying to make a commentary: ….popular girls have insecurities. “
KJ: Like oh, that’s what drives women to like eat guys alive…is our insecurities, maybe?
KW: Yeah and they pointed out that she had an eating disorder, she uses laxatives to stay skinny… this is the Megan Fox character, Jennifer.
KJ: I like how the spoilers is that “she uses laxatives to lose weight,” like that’s the spoiler.
KW: Right. Spoiler. She gets an eating disorder!

**

KW: Right and I don’t know, I think I wanted to like her character more, if she was cooler and funnier, instead she was—
KJ: Right. cause you could get behind the demon thing if you actually liked her.
KW: Yeah..i guess?
KJ: Maybe the other point was that Jennifer was insecure and she was feasting on the attention of boys and using her sexuality and she got power from that? Maybe this is where the inspiration from the movie came from?
KW: Right, a biting commentary.
KJ: But yeah that didn’t come out at all, you had to kind of search for that meaning and once you found it it was like, oh, that’s not really….
KW: And we were searching pretty hard. Probably not everyone was searching this hard.

**

KW: Also there was there was this horrific, like triggering kind of gang rape scene .
KJ: YEAH!
KW: where she gets tied up by this indie rock band and knifed to death [air quotes], I mean that’s when she gets overcome by the demon.
KJ: She’s also kidnapped sort of? [more air quotes] by this evil indie band, which I also found really creepy because if you were in Needy’s position and you saw your best friend come out of a bar, she’s really out of it, and the band is like come with us, get in the van, and you know, to her you’re not watching a Diablo Cody horror movie, it was kind of scary! It was like they were blending this kind of real scary situation but it was hard for me to play that off like ‘ha ha see you later”
KW: “This is kind of campy! This is sort of funny!”
KJ: It wasn’t campy it was weird. And so was the scene where they sacrifice her.
KW: It was already kind of weird to be so irreverent about teen pregnancy, and then to be irreverent about teen rape and murder was just like, “Even within this context….”

**

KJ: I thought it was interesting in the end how Chip is the one whose life is in danger and his girlfriend is the one who has to come to the rescue and you don’t’ see that every day.
KW: Yeah I liked that too. She was wearing a really tacky prom dress too. I actually really like the heterosexual high school couple’s relationship. I felt like, even when they kind of gave us too much of a window into their awkward sex it seemed really realistic.
KJ: Diablo Cody learned a lesson from Juno and put in a condom this time , which was awesome.
KW: Amy Sedaris played the mom, who I’m a fan of, so that was cool to see. Although… she wasn’t really in it. None of the characters really had parents…that were really in the movie. And of course Amanda Seyfried, the best friend Needy, gets basically… I mean she does murder Jennifer at the end of the movie and she gets found having murdered her when what she really did was save the whole town from the demon and so she has to go to a correctional facility…
KJ: which was weird, I thought that was a whole other can of worms.
KW: Yeah I mean I guess I really didn’t like that decision to inject some realism at the end. Like couldn’t she just have gotten away with it?
KJ: Yeah isn’t that what we’re doing here?
KW: Right couldn’t she have ended up the empowered female character? She does break out of prison but you get the impression that she’s going right back.

**

KW: Bitch magazine was supposed to be in the movie..! We signed a waiver for set dressing, but we didn’t see it the whole time
KJ: No . I thought I did but I could have been wrong.
KW: It didn’t show up. I think that could have helped. Diablo Cody, if you’re watching….

**

KW: So I guess I would say overall, probably we don’t recommend it, if you haven’t seen it in the theater yet. Save your money…or you know just renew your subscription to Bitch. !