Diablo Cody Needs A Re-Write

I just finished reading a draft of her new film, Jennifer's Body, and I've got woefully mixed feelings. I liked Juno a lot and I've been looking forward to the follow-up, but, having read what I read, I'm a tad worried.

Here's why: The ending sucks.

HARD.

The story's somewhat non-linear, so "technically" the kind of thing we should be waiting for as a climax is actually shown like 15 pages in, leaving the film's real ending on a bit of a pointless cliff-hanger.



I'm getting ahead of myself. Jennifer's Body (possible spoilers) is about a young girl named Anita "Needy" Lesnicki, kind of your typical nerdy-but-cute, too smart for a small town girl (to be played by Mean Girls' supporting player Amanda Seyfried.) She's BFF with Megan Fox's hot it-girl Jennifer Check. An emo-band comes to their town and does some satanic ritual and Jennifer turns into a boy-eating, demon-possessed hellcat, leaving her best friend to have to destroy her, Buffy style.



It's an interesting concept, and Cody writes the fuck out of it. All the artfully esoteric references and cloying dialogue cadences from Juno remain intact, only this time, rather than serving a bittersweet, indie-dramady tone, she's tackling a more darkly comedic horror style.

The self-aware, wink-nod-knowing horror movie's been done, but probably not this stylishly in some time. The characters are well drawn, at least the ones who aren't background gen-y satire stand-ins. The actual horror elements are intriguing, even on the page, and the film looks to be gory beyond all plausibility. It's a nice blend of Joss Whedon-esque, girl-power genre-mish-mash and The Craft style teen pap. If I sound kind of jaded on the subject, it's only because the last 15 pages of the script pissed me off so much. I, for the most part, loved the goddamn thing.

It just needs a rewrite. It is literally like Diablo Cody wrote the script without a real roadmap, and figured she'd come up with a more interesting climax than the one she spoiled in the film's opening and never got around to it. The draft is dated September of '07, so I'm hoping she did some polish work before they went into production. Otherwise, this movie is fucked.

If you come out the gate and win a fucking Oscar for your first screenplay, especially for a film already enjoying a healthy critical backlash, your sophomore effort really can't afford that type of junior mistake. Another review compared it to being her Mallrats, ie, a film that attempts to keep the stylistic integrity of the first film, but reach out to a more mainstream audience and fail.



Not helping matters at all is director Karyn Kusama, fresh off her spectacular bomb/waste of studio money Aeon Flux. She probably signed on to do this movie hoping to ride the Diablo Cody Gravy Train out of Director Jail, but if they don't touch up that third act, she'll just be another passenger on the sinking ship.