mainstream media
Jennifer’s Body
We saw Jennifer’s Body at TIFF09. It is a fun fright fest, I mean how can you go wrong with a super hot high school girl turned human-flesh eating demon who seduces boys and then rips them to shreds. Plus, as a bonus, there is the hottest lesbian kiss in mainstream media between Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried.
Alas, while Jennifer’s body (the physical corpus) is very much worth of the general public’s lust, there’s no gratuitous nudity, not even a single breast, despite many opportunities. There’s a single distant shot of Fox swimming naked across a lake, but otherwise more about the blood than the boobies.
In the end, the omission of fleeting nudity is forgivable as the two stars more than make up for it with a light-hearted and funny screen presence and some very sexy moments. It was an entirely enjoyable experience. And it was nice to see Ash.
Diary Of The Dead
George Romero’s Diary of the Dead premiered as a sold-out midnight show at TIFF. It doesn’t disappoint, keeping up the gore and fun of the series. The framing context of this particular undead episode is a bunch of film students and making a mummy film in the woods when the dead come walking home. They decide to flee to their family homes as they struggle to come to grips with the reality of the situation, somehow (against demographic) apparently not having seen any of the previous “… of the Dead” movies and not immediately grasping the seriousness of the situation and so making those wonderful horror movie mistakes.
As they go on, one of the gang becomes obsessed with capturing the disaster on film and the story is told from the perspective of his UGC (user generated content). In the end it isn’t clear whether the meta-comment is that UGC is valuable (“mainstream media is lying”) or detrimental (“with so many voices, nobody knows what to believe”).
Either way, it’s a fun movie with plenty of blood and gore.
2007 Toronto International Film Festival