12 Days of Highly Tolerable Holiday Movies: Twelve Monkeys

The Freedom For Animals association on Second Avenue is the secret headquarters of the Army of the 12 Monkeys. They’re the ones who are going to do it. I can’t do anymore, I have to go now. Have a Merry Christmas!

12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995). All-time favorite film, all-time favorite director.

In a future world devastated by disease, a convict is sent back in time to gather information about the man-made virus that wiped out most of the human population on the planet.

(the imdb)

So as I said, this is my favorite movie of all time, in any genre — all other comers are just vying for second — and I screencapped the everloving Gilliamic crap out of it last week.

Filled with glee that this qualified as a holiday picture, I innocently thought, “Surely everyone who ever planned to see this film has seen it by now, so it’s okay for me to put up all my pictures.”

But if the internet has taught me anything in the past year on this here thought experiment, it is above all else that it is possible for people to get mad at you for anything, so, at a certain point, this post will have a jump/cut. You will be able to click and be taken to a standalone page with only this entry, so that those sensitive surfers who I think must actually go searching pop culture blogs specifically for spoilers will not be able to yell at me for said spoilers. I’ll also be able to prove why this is a holiday movie.

That point is now. Click below to go to the full-page entry, with trivia, analysis, lines, and tons more pictures.

“I am mentally divergent, in that I am escaping certain unnamed realities that plague my life here. When I stop going [to Ogo], I will be well. Are you also divergent, friend?” Click here if you qualify for bunny slippers at the monkeyhouse. (Be honest.)

edit: I took the jump out. Screw the small minority of spoiler-haters. Sorry, guys. Rail away if you must.

Still with me? Great!

Telephone call? Telephone call? That’s — that’s communication with the outside world. Doctor’s discretion. Uh-uh. Look, if all of these nuts could just … make phone calls, they could spread insanity! Oozing through telephone cables, oozing into the ears of all those poor, sane people — infecting them! Wackos everywhere: plague of madness.

Hence the agony of foreknowledge combined with the impotence to do anything about it. …

Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment. In this context, wouldn’t you agree that “Chicken Little” represents the sane vision and that homo sapiens‘ motto, “Let’s go shopping!” is the cry of the true lunatic?

(That last was Dr. “Actual Bad Guy” Peters. He says it to Kathryn after her lecture when he’s getting his book signed.)

The lion James sees at the beginning is echoed by the camel perched on the top of the hotel in 1996. The image also shows up in a frame of a statue of a lion atop a stone as they search for Goines, and by the giraffes running across the overpass in Philadelphia many frames down.

No detail is too small to be necessary to the mise en scene of this film. Kathryn watches this Woody Woodpecker cartoon as she waits for James to get back in 1996 to the Oasis hotel. In the asylum in 1990, the movie on the television in the background as Goines rants is the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business.

I get it! This is your old plan, right?

Plan? What are you talking about?

Remember? We were in the dayroom, watching television, and you were all upset about the–the — desecration of the planet, and you said to me, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a germ, or a virus, that could wipe out mankind and leave the plants and animals just as they are?” You do remember that, don’t you?

Bulishit! You’re fucking with my head!

And that’s when I told you my father was this famous virologist and you said, “Hey, he could make a germ and we could steal it!”

Listen, you dumb fuck! The thing mutates — We live underground! The world belongs to the — the fucking dogs and cats. We’re like moles or worms. All we want to do is study the original!

Chris Meloni of Law & Order: SVU in a lovely little dickish part, a totally Terry Gilliam character: an individual given all the facts who refuses to acknowledge the possibility that the truth suggested by those facts could possibly be. Gilliam thrives on the absurd, and I think throws these Doubting Thomases in to the works to demonstrate how ugly a reception his credulous character constructions would receive in the world we all agree to be “real.”

Women will want to get to know you.

For me this is the creepiest Scientist line in the film. Even in the future, when the plague has driven everyone underground, a guy who considers himself “hep” will try to use the allure of poontang to bring a poor guy down. So unfair and underselling for the Cole character, like that is a carrot that can be held out before him in the face of what he’s endured.

Until I was screencapping, I never really noticed how much screen time the so-called “Apocalypse Nut” and true villain, David Morse playing Dr. Peters, Jeffrey’s father Dr. Goines’ lab tech, is given.

When I was institutionalized, my brain was studied exhaustively in the guise of “mental health.” I was interrogated, I was x-rayed, I was examined thoroughly.

Then they took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Yes! Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, ten years, which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to — to determine everything I was going to do in that period.

So you see, she knew I was going to lead the Army of the Twelve Monkeys into the pages of history, before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I’m ever going to do before I know it myself. How’s that?

Who cares what psychiatrists write on walls?

I say this when a Thing matters and we are trying to diminish it.

Hey! Is that the police? I’m in here, I’m an innocent victim! I was attacked. By a coked-out whore and some fucked-up dentist!

I love how deranged Kathryn is in this scene, screaming at James to get Wallace’s wallet before they skedaddle. “We need cash!” But moments before, so tender when she touches his scalp with her curiously ugly hands. Madeline Stowe is the bomb.

Oh, hey, what’s a holiday movie? This is! Besides taking place during the Christmas season, we got some straight-up Santa action goin’ right here. Hope you can handle how very “holiday” this movie is.

James! James! It’s okay. We’re insane! We’re crazy! It’s a carpet cleaning company —

A carpet cleaning company?

No scientists — no people from the future! It’s just a carpet cleaning company. They have voice mail; you leave a message telling them when you want your carpet cleaned.

You … you left them a message?

Yeah, I couldn’t resist. I said, “The Freedom For Animals Association on 2nd Avenue is the —”

“— ‘is the secret headquarters of the Army of the 12 Monkeys. They’re the ones who are going to do it. I can’t do anymore, I have to go now. Have a Merry Christmas.'”

I’m not crazy.

I think I’ve seen this movie before. When I was a kid. It was on TV.

The Vertigo moment. This movie’s plot was inspired by Chris Marker’s La jetée, which also, in its turn, refers to the film Vertigo. While in the past, the protagonist of La jetée visits a Museum of Natural History with the blonde object of his affections, who points to the trunk of a cross-sectioned tree, the same way Kim Novak does in Muir Woods in Hitchock’s Vertigo, as shown in this scene from Twelve Monkeys. “Here I was born, and here I died. But it was only a moment for you — you took no notice.” Kathryn wears a blonde wig in this scene.

The lion I referred to further back, part of the recurring theme of wilderness which has been kept in captivity, let loose. Like the camel, like the giraffes, like the lethal virus, like James Cole released from his future underground incarceration to try and make time turn back and stand still.

It’s not just my dream. I was actually here! I remember now. … About a week or two before — before everybody started dying. I think you were here, too. But you — you looked just like you look now.

The exterior shots for the crucial airport scenes were done at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, while the interiors are from the Reading Terminal at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Today, you gotta take in to account your Army-of-the-Twelve-Monkeys factor.

Wh–what? What did you say?

The Twelve Monkeys, honey. … Bunch’a weirdoes let all the animals out of the zoo last night.

This cabbie’s name is Annie Golden. You can also catch her in the soon-to-be-justly-famous I Love You, Phillip Morris.

That’s what they were up to! Freeing the animals!

On the walls — they meant the animals when they said, “We did it.”

Only assholes write on walls.

Excuse me, sir. I’m going to need to have a look at the contents of your bag.

Me?

Biological samples. I have the paperwork right here.

I’m going to have to ask you to open this, sir.

Open it? … Of course.

The curious, diffuse wash that bathes these final scenes was acheived with Fresnel lensed lights. Fresnels, a favorite tool of Gilliam’s, are a beveled lighthouse-and-old-car-headlamp-style lens.

The entire instrument consists of a metal housing, a reflector, a lamp assembly, and a Fresnel lens. Fresnel instruments usually have a convenient way of changing the focal distance between the lamp and the lens. The Fresnel lens produces a very soft-edged beam, so it is often used as a wash light. A holder in front of the lens can hold a colored plastic film (gel) to tint the light or wire screens or frosted plastic to diffuse it. … The Fresnel lens is useful in the making of motion pictures not only because of its ability to focus the beam brighter than a typical lens, but also because the light is a relatively consistent intensity across the entire width of the beam of light.

(the wiki)

I remember reading a review when this film came out which criticized the inconsistency between Cole’s memory of this moment from dream to dream and what happened in actuality. The reviewer said it took away from the original inspirational idea in La jetée, where Marker’s narrator saw himself die as a child but, they felt, moved more definitely toward that moment as events unfolded in the short film. The supplanting of an unseen “Watch it” man in a yellow jacket with first Goines and then Dr. Peters was, the reviewer claimed, too foggy.

Well, excuse me, Mr. Super-brilliant reviewer, but the fogginess is kind of the entire point. The weirdly symmetrical plot of Twelve Monkeys is a cyclical rumination on the subjectivity of memory and identity. Put that in your cool-guy pipe and smoke it. Asshat.

I went to this film probably a few months after its release, when it hit the $2 second-run theater we had in town at that time, and I ended up going back almost every night that week, taking different friends. I remember very clearly that one of my friends said when it was over, “That’s so weird that in the future the insurance lady that sits by the bad guy on the plane is a scientist.”

“Um — I’m pretty sure she’s from the future in that scene.” Like, maybe it’s too late for Philly, but she’s going to stop Peters from going to San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, et al. She says she is in insurance. Right? I mean, we’ve seen her in 2035, looking exactly the same, a highly placed physicist. I sincerely doubt that in 1996 she was an insurance agent who planned to survive the plague and not age.

Is this even up for debate? I’m serious, does someone have an alternate interpretation of that scene?

Fight Club Friday: the Calvin and Hobbes connection

via.

Picture this: a hyper, self-absorbed child initially concocts an imaginary friend as the ideal playmate, to whom more realistic qualities soon become attributed. This phantasm becomes a completely separate personality, with his own likes, dislikes, temperament — and the imaginer and the imagined clash and argue constantly, though remaining fast friends.

(Chow, Galvin P. “Fight Club: the Return of Hobbes.” March 11, 2001.)

Marla Singer = Susie Derkins, who Calvin hates and Hobbes sends valentines.

Daaannnnng.

Spread the word.

69 Days of Wonder Woman, Day 7: Why then, o brawling love, o loving hate, o anything of nothing first create?

(This was all news to me. So the theories advanced here are kind of fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants.)

Wonder Woman’s archnemesis Cheetah was apparently introduced in No. 6.1 of the original, Marston-penned Wonder Woman line (1943). The original Cheetah was Priscilla Rich.

via the wiki, Cheetah’s first appearance, 1943. Cover art by Harry Peter.

Priscilla Rich was depicted as a young, insecure debutante who suffered from a split personality developed because of her inferiority complex. Following a benefit dinner, Ms. Rich’s alternate personality became dominant, triggered by an encounter with Wonder Woman, whose superiority to earth women activated Ms. Rich’s coping mechanism for her low self-esteem. This other self, Cheetah, continues to come out from time to time to try and kill Diana, foil her plans for good, etc.

I noted with interest in researching her that, in a lot of the panels I read, it seems that Ms. Rich’s alter ego, Cheetah, actually hates the Priscilla personality almost as much as she dislikes Wonder Woman.

Priscilla retreats to her room and collapses before her makeup mirror. There she sees an image of a woman dressed like a cheetah. “Horrors!” she cries, as she gazes at her evil inner-self for the first time.

(the wiki.)

“Don’t you know me?” replies the reflection. “I am the REAL you — the Cheetah — a treacherous, relentless huntress!” The image commands her to fashion a Cheetah costume. “From now on,” intones the reflection, “when I command you, you shall go forth dressed like your TRUE self and do as I command you…”

(Ibid.)

It is not terribly difficult to see metaphors here for female cattiness. I think it goes back to what I wrote about earlier, the empty need for women to best each other. Ms. Rich and Wonder Woman had no actual beef: why did Ms. Rich create one? Because she felt insecure.

And why does Cheetah hate herself almost as much as she hates Wonder Woman?

I think because she despises her own weakness, and, as Cheetah, she sees her Priscilla personality as hampering her goal to become the greatest woman alive.

So a) she makes something out of nothing because b) she feels badly about herself, doubly over. That’s crazy and yet so true and typical.

She does not want to, but she must. Why? It is so unnecessary, just as it is unnecessary for women to gang up on one another in real life, too. But they always do.

Final note: the IGN ranked Cheetah in 2009 as the 69th Greatest Comic Book Villain of All Time, which is great synchronicity for our 69-day project.

E.E. Cummings Month: “All in green went my love riding”

The following Cummings poem is not much like his usual at first blush, but is really full of simple wordplay and tricksy manipulation of conventions that conceals a more complex meaning than simple medieval ballad — which is much more in keeping with what you’d expect, yes? “All in green went my love riding” has been set to music and sung by, among many, Warren Kinsella and one of my patronessiest of patron saints, Joan Baez. The most widely accepted meaning of the poem is that it is a subtle retelling of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. (Variations of the myth here.)

Modesty Blaise.

As far as I can tell, in the version on which Cummings has based “All in green went my love riding,” Actaeon is a merciless hunter who desires to marry Artemis after he sees her bathing. The virgin warrior goddess is furious at this cheek, particularly that he would spy on her and then imply she owes him marriage (she fiercely protected her physical privacy and chastity).

The lovely and talented Marguerite Empey.

Artemis punishes Actaeon by warning him that, if he ever speaks, he will be transformed in to a stag and devoured by his own bitches, which is where it seems Cummings picks up the thread. Here it is.

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the merry deer ran before.

Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
the swift sweet deer
the red rare deer.

Four red roebuck at a white water
the cruel bugle sang before.

Horn at hip went my love riding
riding the echo down
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the level meadows ran before.

via sabino on the tumblr.

Softer be they than slippered sleep
the lean lithe deer
the fleet flown deer.

Four fleet does at a gold valley
the famished arrow sang before.

Photographed by Neil Krug.

Bow at belt went my love riding
riding the mountain down
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the sheer peaks ran before.

Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer
the tall tense deer.

Four tell stags at a green mountain
the lucky hunter sang before.

Amber Weber for I.D., September 2008.

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.

(E.E. Cummings, “All in green went my love riding.” Tulips and Chimneys. 1923.)

He just had to sing all triumphantly, didn’t he, in front of the green mountain? Heart = hart. A synonym for stag. Pretty sure that between the line about stags and the repetition of “all in green,” Artemis changed him in to one of the “Four tell stags” and his own dogs ripped him to pieces.

Liv Tyler.

Also I noticed on this re-read that she dwells longer than I remembered over her four dead does. This makes sense because besides being the ruler of nature and the hunt, she held deer and cypress as her closest animal and plant brethren. The victims of Actaeon’s arrow and his ravaging dogs, those four deer emerge in her description unquestionably as females: they are slender, pale, lithe, slippered — red and rare. Virginal language, am I right? That purity and feminity gives the “Four” power and deserves honor, just as does Artemis’s own virginity, which bathtime-peeping Actaeon and his sleazy, brutish hounds do not seem to understand or respect.

via thechocobrig on the tumblr. fabulous photojournal.

By contrast, in all of the lines which describe his four animals, Actaeon’s “four” appears in lowercase letters — the only Cummingsish punctuation-play in the poem, as the four remain in lowercase despite following periods, which Cummings otherwise obeys with great restraint for the rest of the poem. Actaeon’s four are the four hounds; the miniscule rather than majuscal “f” usage denotes the speaker’s low opinion of them and bodes very badly for them, considering Artemis’s usual respect for nature. The number four, besides paralleling the count of her lost deer, is suggestive of pursuit of living creatures in all four of the cardinal directions, a kind of inescapable squared threat in terms of the swath a disrespectful hunter might cut through the planet of a goddess who considers herself the mother of nature — because of its relationship to “four corners,” “four winds,” etc, the total of four hounds is exactly the right number to appear confounding and problematic. An unignorable affront which must be dealt with.

Abbey Lee Kershaw for Dazed and Confused.

The four hounds may also perhaps be a reference to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse who accompany Death in the Revelation of St. John: the hunter brings destruction to what Artemis is sworn to protect; she is the patroness of life on earth, a mother-warrior figure who gives her attention to springs and deer, and Actaeon is that life’s death, a sanguine, horn-blowing archer with attendantly destructive hell hounds that tear her living creatures apart. An essentially unforgivable encroachment on all that Artemis stands for. Those four lean crouching motherfuckers act as a smirking antithesis to her binding and symbiotic method of mothering the earth, by dismantling and devouring everything they encounter, famished agents of a chaos she is sworn to repel. They tear things up.

In this case, their master, too. Does the punishment fit the crime?

I’ve read that there are allusions here to “The Knight’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I never make it far through those. I know as a happy medievalist I’m supposed to read and adore them and that what I’m about to tell you could get me yelled at and kicked out of the society of nerds who read material that predates van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the very lenses the best of the best wear to strain our eyes over the stuff we love, but I feel that poring over Chaucer is something akin to people in a thousand years venerating the script of Rat Race. Great movie, solidly entertaining, good cast with varied backstories, but, like, how dire is reading it to the quest of accurately intrepreting society in this era? Not much. (Commence lambasting, Chaucer-lovers. Change my mind?)

Journey Into Perplexity right here on the wordpress.

Anyway. If you follow that link to the wiki list of variations on the Artemis and Actaeon story, you can see that different authors have spent time cataloguing the precise names of the up-to-fifty hounds involved in Actaeon’s punishment.

I guess the lesson here is that, if you want even a chance with Artemis, you need to be green in deed as well as dress. Keep your elbows out and for god’s sake recycle, dudes.

Ghost World Half-Day — It isn’t easy being green

There are a lot of eye-popping colors in Ghost World, but the three most consistent elements of what I think of as the Enid Palette are vivid primaries: red, blue, and green.

A very specific and bilious shade of green emerges early in Enid’s wardrobe. This poisonous-snake shade appears in her clothing, which complements the strong primaries in which Enid usually dresses, as well as her black bob and dark glasses with her fair skin and blue eyes.

In the above shot, both girls wear green, but the colors and their function are totally different. Rebecca’s simple, anonymous knit shirt is kind of leaf-green and yellow, characteristic of the dusky rose, natural understatement in the palette associated with her character — in contrast, Enid’s plaid schoolgirl skirt is deliberately shockingly green, an unflattering color in a style that is a send-up of conformity.

As a symbolic or character-establishing color, it’s pretty elementary to suppose that Enid favors this green because she, herself, has some wide streaks of biliousness and poisonous-snaky snark.

Enid: Hello there, young employee of the Sidewinder.
Josh: I already told you I’m not going to give you a ride.
Enid: What can you tell me, young man, about the various flavors of “frozen yogurt”?
Josh: Look, I’ll be done in a minute. Just wait outside.
Boss: JOSH! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?
Josh: (sighs) The flavors we’re featuring this week, in addition to old favorites chocolate and vanilla, are Six-Gun Strawberry, Wild Cherry Round-up, and Ten Gallon Tangerine.
Enid: Hmm. I don’t believe I care for any of those.

Over the course of the film, as Enid begins more deeply probing who she “is” and what that will mean for the rest of her life, the green starts to migrate. It appears on her lips; she wears green lipstick— I think not coincidentally — while she and Rebecca are deliberately lying to Seymour, leading him on to think Enid cares about his blues .78’s so they can laugh at his expense later. When she is inspired by old punk music and seeking to try new identities, the green moves to her hair.

Rebecca: (disdainful) When did you do that?
Enid: What? How long have you been standing there?
Rebecca: Did you have to buy new hair dye or did you still have some left over from eighth grade?
Enid: Fuck you, bitch!

Enid: Hi… what’s your name?
Man: (looks at watchless wrist, then down the street) Norman.
Enid:…Are you waiting for a bus?
Man: Yes.
Enid: I hate to tell you this, but they cancelled this bus line two years ago. There are no buses on this street.
Man: You don’t know what you’re talking about.

The green hair and the identity with which Enid associates it has surprising side effects: for one thing, it makes her ballsier. She is able to admit she wants to see Josh, even though he isn’t home. She finally brings to an end (shown two caps above) Rebecca and her long-standing speculation about the man who waits for the bus. And she gets mouthier than normal (partly due to defensiveness) with people she usually settles for being subtly rude to.

(Inside Zine-O-Phobia Bookshop)

Creep 1: I’m telling you, you’re wrong — carpet beetles are the only way to get the flesh off a corpse… Boiling is strictly for amateurs!
Enid: Don’t you creeps ever talk about anything nice?? Don’t you ever talk about … fluffy kittens or the Easter Bunny?
Creep 1: Look who’s talking — Little Miss Badass.
Creep 2: Yeah, nice outfit. Who are you supposed to be, Cyndi Lauper?
Enid: Blow me, doofus!

John Ellis: Oh. Didn’t they tell you?
Enid: Tell me what?
John Ellis: Punk rock is over.
Enid: I know it’s over, asshole, I —
John Ellis: Yeah, if you really want to “fuck up the system,” you should go to business school. That’s what I’m gonna do. Get a job at some big corporation and fuck things up from the inside!

You can see the wheels turning for Enid during this exchange and she is reasoning through her attempt to adapt a punk identity; she doesn’t like all the flak she’s getting for it and she doesn’t want people to think she’s a blindly-anarchic bomb-tosser, either. (I think Enid is mainly far too socially scarred, which manifests itself as smug mistrust and smirking aloofness, by other people to “join” any kind of revolution, ever.)

Enid: That’s not even …
John Ellis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have my money?

(She wads up a twenty-dollar bill and throws it at him.)

John Ellis: Ooh, how “punk”.
Enid: That tape sucked, by the way.

Enid: It’s not like I’m some modern Punk dickhead… It’s obviously supposed to be a 1977 Punk look, but I guess Johnny Fuckface is too stupid to get it!
Rebecca: I didn’t get it either.
Enid: Everybody’s too stupid!

She dyes her hair back to black and continues trying to express herself (still having yet to realize in the bildungsroman tradition that she must find herself first, and expression will follow much more easily) through wardrobe, smart mouth, and hasty decisions.

That was fun. Maybe I’ll do red or blue later.

All the screencaps for Ghost World Half-Day will come from a combination of sources: heartstopper, augustusgloop, and vodiak on the LJ; Movie Screenshots on the blogger; various imdb caps and old, unsourced still shots. Also I might scan some pictures from the graphic novel since I am right now looking at the spine of it in a pile of books on my desk.

Movie Moment: Jennifer’s Body

Jennifer’s Body, 2009. Directed by Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) and written by Diablo Cody (Juno).

Nerdy, reserved bookworm Needy and arrogant, conceited cheerleader Jennifer are best friends, though they share little in common. They share even less in common when Jennifer mysteriously gains an appetite for human blood after a disastrous fire at a local bar. As Needy’s male classmates are steadily killed off in gruesome attacks, the young girl must uncover the truth behind her friend’s transformation and find a way to stop the bloodthirsty rampage before it reaches her own boyfriend Chip. (the imdb)

“Jennifer’s Body” is not only a fantasy of revenge against the predatory male sex, though the ultimate enactment of that revenge is awfully satisfying. The antagonism and attraction between boys and girls is a relatively straightforward (if, in this case, grisly) matter; the real terror, the stuff of Needy’s nightmares, lies in the snares and shadows of female friendship.

(“Hell is other people, especially the popular girl.” 18 September 2009. Scott, A.O. The New York Times.)

The relationship between Needy and Jennifer is rivalrous, sisterly, undermining, sadomasochistic, treacherous and tender. …

Ms. Cody and Ms. Kusama take up a theme shared by slasher films and teenage comedies — that queasy, panicky fascination with female sexuality that we all know and sublimate — and turn it inside out. This is not a simple reversal of perspective; “Jennifer’s Body” goes further, taking the complication and confusion of being a young woman as its central problem and operating principle. (Ibid.)

In this movie, hell is actually two girls, embroiled in the fiendish complexity of a deep female friendship. The fact that one of them is a boy-eating demon is, believe it or not, secondary.

(“Jennifer’s Body: Megan Fox Is a Man Eater.” 18 September 2009. Pols, Mary. Time.)

Female empowerment would have been the obvious message here, with Jennifer’s bloody appetites stemming from a take-back-the-night scenario gone terribly awry, so it was a pleasure to see Cody and Kusama delving instead into the frequently disempowering effect of female friendships. (Ibid.)

[Jennifer’s Body’s] depiction of the ways in which women like Needy are willing to compromise themselves to indulge an ultimately less secure friend is spot-on. (Ibid.)

As a comic allegory of what it’s like to be an adolescent girl who comes into sexual and social power that she doesn’t know what the heck to do with, [Jennifer’s Body] is a minor classic.

(“Horror-comedy with feminist bite.” 18 September 2009. Rickey, Carrie. The Philadelphia Inquirer.)

“There is within Diablo Cody the soul of an artist, and her screenplay brings to this material a certain edge, a kind of gleeful relish, that’s uncompromising. This isn’t your assembly-line teen horror thriller. The portraits of Jennifer and Needy are a little too knowing.” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times.

Kusama and Cody’s collaboration is a wicked black comedy with unexpected emotional resonance, one of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year so far.

To quote Courtney Love (whose song “Jennifer’s Body” gave the movie its title and whose music plays over the closing credits), Jennifer Check is the girl with the most cake.

(“Jennifer’s Body: One of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year so far.” 17 September 2009. Stevens, Dana. Slate.)

“At least nobody’s falling in love with a brooding hunk of an eyeliner-wearing vampire in this movie. Come to think of it, I’d like to see Jennifer get transferred to that Twilight high school and shake things up.” — Richard Roeper. (I never thought I’d agree with him on anything, but holy cannoli, Richard Roeper. Have mercy! A quote like that gets a gal hummin’: I may yet have your stupid, studio-ass-kissing baby, after all.)

Megan Fox, whose previous roles called on little more than her ability to successfully straddle a motorcycle, nails this tricky role. She does more than look sensational—she shows us what it feels like to be a sensational-looking young woman and to wield that as your only power. Fox seems to understand the key gambit of Cody’s script: Her character is less a teenage girl turned monster than an exploration of the monster that lurks inside every teenage girl.

(Stevens, Slate.)

Needy: I thought you only murdered boys.
Jennifer: (shrug) I go both ways.

The negative early reviews with which “Jennifer’s Body” has been greeted are puzzling. Critics seem irked that the picture’s not a full-on horror film or a straight teen comedy or a familiar satirical combination of the two. But the movie has other intentions: It’s really about the social horrors of high school for adolescent girls.

The picture has a tone — smart and slashingly sarcastic — that’s all its own. It’s actually kind of brilliant.

(“Jennifer’s Body: Girl Trouble” 18 September 2009. By fucking KURT LODER. MTV.com)

Chip: I can take care of myself. I’ve been using the bowflex.

Needy: You know what? You were never really a good friend. Even when we were little, you used to steal my toys and pour lemonade on my bed!

Jennifer: And now I’m eating your boyfriend. See? At least I’m consistent.

Needy: Why do you need him? You can have anybody that you want, Jennifer. So why Chip? Just to tick me off? or is it because you’re just really that insecure?

Jennifer: I am not “insecure,” Needy. God! Wh–? That’s a joke! How could I ever be insecure? I was the Snowflake Queen!

Needy: Pffft. Yeah. Two years ago — when you were socially relevant —

Jennifer: (draws in breath) I … am … still … socially relevant.

Needy: — and when you didn’t need laxatives to stay skinny.

Jennifer: (full monster morph time)

Man. Frenemies always know the right buttons to push, amirite?

I think Needy’s relationship with Chip was really, really threatening to Jennifer. I think it is why Jennifer claimed to need to find talent outside of Devil Kettle and why she fixated on that Nikolai tool to begin with — she wanted Needy’s attention back, and she needed to create drama to get it, by going for a guy she knew her friend would have qualms about. She thought Needy would be jealous and want to ride to her rescue. Except it backfired because not only could Needy see through the so-called punk’s ridiculously fake exterior and the desperate, shallow need for everyone’s adulation that was his true inner core, but Jennifer’s pursuit of him exposed the same hollow innards in herself. That’s my take on what tipped the action in to play. Seaquest out. Back to the pros.

Not since Brian De Palma’s Carrie has a horror movie so effectively exploited the genre as a metaphor for adolescent angst, female sexuality and the strange, sometimes corrosive bonds between girls who claim to be best friends.

(Jennifer’s Body.” Rodriguez, Rene. 18 September 2009. Miami Herald.)

Driver: So. Why you headed east?
Needy: I’m — I’m following this rock band.
Driver: Wow, must be one hell of a group.
Needy: Actually … tonight’s going to be their last show.

Most stills courtesy of One Movie, One Day on the tumblr. Thank you so, so much for all your awesome, superfly screencaps!

Movie Moment: Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973)

Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen as Holly and Kit in Malick’s masterwork Badlands (1973). Warren Oates as her father.

Holly practices her clarinet on a bench, waiting for her father. Her father pulls up. They go home. Holly goes upstairs. Her boyfriend Kit comes over. He and her father have words. Kit shoots Holly’s father.

Having come down the stairs, Holly goes to her father’s side.

Kit watches and lights a cigarette.

She knows her father is going to die and that Kit has shot him, and she is not really shocked or reproachful, per se. It’s difficult to judge whether Holly is an unthinking person or if she is a person who just floats — don’t be fooled by her voice-over narration; Malick plays with contrasts between what’s reported and what we actually observe — through her life, someone who expects nothing and accepts everything.

Either way her father’s death is not a surprise. But because she expects nothing, she isn’t sure what Kit will do next. She is only slightly afraid that he might do something to her. You can read that here.

What Kit does next is he goes to a service station to get a can of gasoline. There is a coin-operated game there, a voice-recorder. He punches through the glass of the game. This act of time-consuming vandalism when he is trying to quickly throw together a plan to conceal a crime is open to interpretation: Kit either makes his own fun, or he cannot brook the bourgeois notion that some witless rube, some fool who has wandered a million years afield from the purpose of man as a hunter, might pay to have his own voice recorded, then, by hearing it played back, feel delight worth the coin he paid. Or maybe Kit has different ideas of how to make a mark, and what ought be recorded. I don’t know. I’m not Kit, and I don’t know Malick and his mind. This is guesswork. Kit leaves with his gas.

He uses the gas to douse Holly’s house, with her father’s corpse still inside.

Holly watches. Darkness is all around her and she is only lit by the lights from within the house. She is getting ready to turn her back on that light, and go in to the dark completely. She’ll go with Kit now.

The fire that began in Holly’s bed is about to consume their entire house. It was a choice that started there and now she has no choice but to go forward with Kit.

Malick handles the destruction of Holly’s house and her father’s body by focusing on the doll and the dollhouse as they burn. This is important. The end of small-minded, cast-mold imitations of real life, the end of modeled and scaled efforts at simulated perfection, leaving innocence behind in ashes. What now, Holly?

I will tell you what now. They leave Fort Dupree, South Dakota, and embark on a several-state killing spree before being captured. Really disturbing, incredibly-acted, understated film, almost totally perfect, and very gorgeous from the compositional perspective. A mixed bag. You very much need to be in the right mood.

The film drew inspiration from the real story of mass killer Charles Starkweather and his teenaged accomplice, Caril Ann Fugate, who killed eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming in January, 1958. Besides Malick’s Badlands, the pair of jerkwad murderers also inspired Natural Born Killers, the 1993 Tim Roth and Fairuza Balk TV mini-series Murders in the Heartland and, though I have never heard it confirmed, rather obviously and less seriously The Frighteners. Starkweather also pops up in works by Stephen King. That’s all I want to say about it. Go look it up if you want more.

I don’t feel like going in to all that partner-killer, famous-murder-spree, monstrous fucking shit right now. I will just say I have not grown into an adult who — nor an adult with the patience to tolerate another adult who — makes a huge to-do over killers. Exceedingly not. It’s why I didn’t even link you up with a wiki hook to that asshole Starkweather and his girl. So please don’t start in on me with factoids or comments about them, thinking we’re buddies-in-kink, if searching for killers because that’s how you get your kicks is how you found this post.

I’m not saying it’s not worth talking or thinking about — anyone with a stake in the success of society as a cooperative effort needs to worry and think and talk about people who break the rules, how they do it, why, and how we deal with it. But glorification and gory gushing on the intricacies of those transgressor’s little personal details? Making them celebrities while forgetting their victims’ names? Not interested.