I'm sorry but who cares? Diablo Cody is about my age and just as I'm probably not the best person to accurately depict todays teenager, neither is she. When we were teenagers, in the mid 1990's, we used expressions and cool words that make teenagers roll their eyes today, just like we rolled our eyes at our parents. Jennifer's Body tries so hard to capture the fleeting taste of teenage life and angst in the "now", that it comes off feeling fake and contrived. For instance: We have to be made to see how sexually liberated the main characters are. Because these days teens have sex, a lot of sex! Even the classic rampantly insecure "ugly" girl with glasses, convincingly portrayed by Amanda Seyfried, has regular sexual encounters with her boyfriend.
What teens don't have these days, according to Cody, are parents. They mostly just turn up at their kids funeral or to distractedly snap a picture before the big dance. Does your kid have to walk to the dance through a large wooded park in the middle of the night, with a serial killer on the lose? No problem, just borrow them your can of pepper spray! But then what self-respecting teenager needs parents when they've got friends?
Friendship is, again according to Cody, a cynical affair based around either someone's sadistic urge to inflict emotional pain or a masochistic urge for personal validation from people you irrationally idolize. If you're Amanda Seyfried's character you also, probably, want to have sex with your best friend, or at least make out. I mean, even if she is a demonic cannibal, she's still a smoking hot cheerleader for God's sake! Did I mention that teenagers have a lot of sex?
Sure, innocent people get killed and the movie tries really hard to care and stuff, but it's just such a drag, you know... If some inconsequential high school boys have to suffer a horrific death so that Megan Fox can walk down school corridors looking radiant and majestic like a $20 dollar hooker, isn't that just a price we'd all be willing to pay? That's right, Diablo Cody really nailed that moral ambiguity correspondence course she took!
All in all this movie goes from kicking in open doors to running face first into the wall. It tells us obvious things like they are great discoveries and depicts teenagers as only a person on the wrong side of 30 would. Some people try to make the case that this movie is filled with metaphors and clever symbolism but Diablo Cody is not a new Ingmar Bergman, she's the screen writer that thought it would be cool to have a character who's just been impaled on a broken pool skimmer, say; "you got a tampon?". The movie gets one star and Amanda Seyfried gets her own, for keeping a straight face and trying to deliver a performance despite the mediocre script. Megan Fox, on the other hand, is very much like the script; overrated and bereft of substance.
In a strip club somewhere there's a pole missing Diablo Cody. After seeing this movie I really hope they can be reunited!