Jennifer’s Body – 18 September 2009
Her role in Transformers may have been responsible for siring the somewhat dubious experience of being sat in a cinema where the entire male section of the audience were undergoing a simultaneous swelling of the groinal region, but one certainly can’t hold that against Megan Fox. And her star looks only set to continue its recent ascent with Jennifer’s Body, a high school horror comedy from the pen of Oscar-winning Juno writer Diablo Cody, in which Fox’s eponymous cheerleader is sacrificed by Adam Brody’s wannabe rock star Nikolai Wolf as part of his bid to land the most Faustian of record deals. However, the blood-letting all goes a bit awry and Jennifer begins chowing down on her fellow students in order to glut her demonic hunger. Directed by Girlfight and Æon Flux helmer Karyn Kusama, and co-starring Amanda Seyfried as “Needy” Lesnicky and Johnny Simmons as Chip Dove (sharing a character name with Matthew Modine’s rapist jock in Hotel New Hampshire), Jennifer’s Body appears an attempt to balance the kind of dark satire of high school society seen in Michael Lehmann’s Heathers with some outright genre thrills. Although whether the shocks contained within the movie itself can measure up to the horror of a soundtrack album featuring such haircut indie guitar goons as Black Kids, White Lies and Panic at the Disco remains to be seen.
- Trailer Here -
Inglourious Basterds – released 21 August 2009
After the chop-socky homage of Kill Bill: Volume One, the spaghetti western styling of its sequel, and the mock-sploitation schlock of the Death Proof segment of Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino’s tour of blood-letting movie genres now takes him to occupied France, with the rapid-yakking auteur delivering his response to such behind-enemy-lines WWII flicks as Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen and indeed the 1978 Inglorious Bastards (of which Tarantino’s movie shares naught but the (ahem) bastardised version of its title). Inglourious Basterds premiered at Cannes earlier this year to a somewhat muddled response. While the performance of Christopher Waltz as Nazi rotter Hans Landa drew praise, as did the irreverent audacity of Tarantino’s take on the most traumatic conflict in global history, there was some grumbling about the truncated screen time of Brad Pitt’s Lieutenant Aldo Raine and criticism of the dialogue-heavy screenplay. However, as the involvement of the likes of Pitt, Diane Kruger, Mike Myers and (on narration duties) Samuel L. Jackson readily testify, Tarantino is still a film-maker who actors fall over themselves to work with, and with parallel storylines converging in an assassination attempt on Hitler himself at the premiere of a Triumph of the Will-style Nazi propaganda extravaganza, it seems unlikely anyone will be able to moan about Inglourious Basterds being in any way short on incident.
- Trailer Here -
- Our Review Here -
