Amanda Seyfried Gets JENNIFER'S BODY
Veronica Mars and Mean Girls vamp Amanda Seyfried tries playing a good girl opposite Megan Fox in the new Karyn Kusama film, Jennifer's Body. But some reviewers wonder if she'll wish she hadn't bothered.
Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls) will star opposite Megan Fox (Transformers) in Jennifer's Body, a supernatural comedy-horror movie written by Diablo Cody and co-produced by Jason Reitman, who collaborated on the Oscar-nominated Juno ("a clever mash up of Napoleon Dynamite and Knocked Up"). BORYS KIT and LESLIE SIMMONS at The Hollywood Reporter broke the casting news.
The busty 22-year-old Seyfried is best known to cult fans as the doomed Lilly Kane on the Kristen Bell series Veronica Mars. She is expected to get a major boost from her starring role, opposite Meryl Streep, in the upcoming big screen version of the ABBA musical Mamma Mia! She also has appeared in the film Alpha Dog with Justin Timberlake, and is a regular on HBO's Big Love.
Co-produced by Dan Dubiecki and Mason Novick, and directed by Karyn Kusama (Aeon Flux) for Fox Atomic, the quirky thriller centers on Jennifer (Fox), a reckless, slutty high school cheerleader in the sleepy town of Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota. After attending a concert at a local dive, Jennifer becomes a fangy, "possessed cannibal demon thing." Our sarcastic narrator and protagonist, the bookish Needy (Seyfried), alone must stop her seductive best friend from chowing down on every lustful young male in town, as well as take on the satanic band that made her that way.
CC2K Staff Writer BIG ROSS got his hands on a copy of the Jennifer's Body screenplay. Then, after he posted a "snarky review," including "an impressive four-point plan detailing the 'bungles' that Diablo made in her script," 20th Century Fox dropped a cease-and-desist order on Big Ross.
However, Latino Review contributor DIABLO FAN read the script and managed to submit some story details, along with his thoughts, without a studio manhandling. In his review, DF admitted to being intrigued by the originality of Jennifer's Body, which "features some unique storytelling and interesting characters as well as some hilarious dialogue." But, he stated, those sunny spots were overshadowed by the absence of a well-paced plot or consistent tone, the latter element of which became most apparent in the disturbing second half.
"I think [this] is going to be like a movie warning girls not to be slutty," commented WOLFBIKER904 on MovieWeb. "Or something along those lines."
Despite calling it "unique," Diablo Fan and other bloggers also have compared the Jennifer's Body script to Donnie Darko, The Craft, Idle Hands and The Exorcist.
"But nowadays, everything sounds like something," posted KATE at FishbowlLA.
Still, The Exorcist, which certainly had some harsh dialogue, didn't feature such classic bon mots as "Fried bologna is the bomb," "Sandbox love never dies," or "I'm a hard-assed, Ford-tough mama bear."
So, while admitting that he's not read the script himself, Defamer's MARK GRAHAM feels "pretty safe declaring that Diablo's streak of consecutive Oscar nominations will come to an end at one."
Jennifer's Body begins shooting in Vancouver next month.
[Thanks to MRDISGUSTING at Bloody-Disgusting for the link; also to KELLVIN CHAVEZ at Latino Review, Mania's JARROD SARAFIN and Zap2it.com.]