Jennifer’s Body was pretty heavily slated on its release, and I can see why. It seems undecided about what genre it wants to be. It has elements of horror, teenage angst, romance, and revenge, but it switches from one to the next without really covering any of them properly. A lot of the plot goes unexplained and important parts, such as Jennifer’s transformation from high school evil to actual evil do not seem to have been thought through properly. However, considering the current film obsessions with most things demonic, not to mention Megan Fox,  i’m still surprised it wasn’t received better.

The film is based in a town called ‘Devil’s Kettle’ and revolves around the friendship between two teenage girls, Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy ( Amanda Seyfried). As her name suggests, Needy dotes on Jennifer and clings to every offering of friendship she doles out. The two are polar opposites, with Jennifer being the school’s most desired female and Needy being her uncool sidekick. The friendship takes a severe beating when after a virgin sacrifice gone wrong, Jennifer transforms into an evil demon with an appetite for human flesh.

The main problem with the movie is that too many things go unexplained. Jennifer turns into a demon but it is never really explained what type of demon she is. It’s clear that she is evil, but it’s not clear what happened to make her evil. All we are told is that an occult sacrifice has gone wrong. Flashbacks take us to a gruesome knife attack on Jennifer, which apparently kills her. Then the transformation happens. We do not see the transformation take place and no proper explanation is given, so the viewer is just left confused.

The soundtrack is the best thing about the movie. It is very retro cool and actually has the effect of keeping you engaged with the film. All the songs are well timed, and match the action that they are being played though. Without them, I probably wouldn’t have been able to watch the film to the end.

Amanda Seyfried is good at playing the long suffering friend ‘Needy’, but her transition from uncool friend to mentally unstable is not that convincing. Megan Fox is pouty as usual playing Jennifer and it’s easy to understand why every guy in the school wants to date her. It’s less easy to understand the random lesbian scene between Jennifer and Needy, which seems completely unnecessary. Needy does not appear to be attracted to women and actually has a serious boyfriend who she is obviously in love with. The lesbian kiss seems to be nothing more than a cheap stunt by the filmmakers to get more men to see the movie.

To conclude, Jennifer’s Body is poorly planned and disappointing. It is quite a cool and hip concept but not enough attention was paid to the dialogue or plot. As a result, it leaves the viewer feeling unsatisfied and unconvinced. I’d pay good money for the soundtrack, but not for the movie.

Starring: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Brody

Dir: Karyn Kusama

Atomic apocalypse may still be upon us. That is what the filmmakers behind “Countdown to Zero” want us to remember. As President Kennedy says, “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.” This quote is used as the thesis behind this film. They used this thesis to scare the guano out of me. Seeing images of nuclear bombs going off while being told how your internal organs may explode if you’re close enough to the epicenter, really makes one ponder how to not have that happen. And that is exactly what they are going for. Getting a response is their way to get their audience to act and do what they want them to do whether that be writing their government, texting to a specific number, donating to a charity or reducing carbon emissions. It is emotional manipulation and it works. However, the direction they are trying to get us to move in is not only naïve, it is futile.

In 1942, the Manhattan Project, led by the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, came together to beat Germany in creating a fission-based weapon. Many of the world’s leading physicists were brought into this incredibly top-secret project. They decided to make two bombs and use uranium in one (Little Boy) and plutonium in the other (Fat Man). Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945 while the Manhattan Project had yet to finish a working weapon. After a test in New Mexico that showed that the plutonium Fat Man released around 19 kilotons of TNT upon detonation, President Truman decided to use it against Japan. Little Boy was released above Hiroshima; Fat Man, above Nagasaki. At least one hundred thousand people died, most of them civilians. Tens of thousands would later die from radiation sicknesses and cancers.

Since 1945, the world has gone from two nuclear weapons to over 23,000 nuclear warheads. We’ve come a long way, baby. It would take just one-megaton bomb exploding in the air to throw the earth into a nuclear winter. So we have enough going here on this little planet to really mess things up. To have any bombs active really feels, on all sides, irresponsible. Like children picking up loaded guns, I wonder if our world leaders really comprehend what they have in their hands? The film’s solution to all this madness, disarm all the bombs. It’s great to aim high, but what are we truly trying to accomplish? In a way, the ancient demon we’re trying to destroy is the threat of great weapons in the wrong hands. It’s stopping outwardly antagonistic countries like North Korea and Iran from getting their hands on something that will kill us all. But then, is it right that we should have the bombs and they shouldn’t? As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is quoted in the film as saying, “If they are good, then why should we be deprived? If they are bad, then why do you have them?” Are we really more reliable, more responsible then they? We, America, are the only country who has ever used one. So really that ancient demon is us – all of us. Every single human on the planet is the reason why the dream of disarming all the nuclear weapons is never going to happen. We are not trusting, nor trustworthy enough to bring the count back down to zero.

There are currently nine countries in the world with confirmed nuclear weapons. Even if by sheer will and luck we are able to get 7 of those countries to completely disarm, the two that are left will fall into a “No, you first” face off. There is just too much power in having something your enemy doesn’t, which won’t allow us to just let it go. We, as a people, do not trust enough to do that. We think, “If I disarm my bombs, and they SAY they’ve disarmed all their bombs, but they really have a secret stash, that will leave me open to attack. I need to have my own secret stash.” And we also think it’s safer for us to have an ace up our sleeve just in case something happens – and in that way we are not trustworthy either. The film is great in that it got me to ponder and talk about all these situations and scenarios. However, call me cynical, but the solution they offer is, I believe, a big pipe dream that will never be realized.

I did not intend to write a review for Inception. I didn’t want to. If I plan on writing about a film, I take my notebook and write my notes by glow of the silver screen. However, when I entered the midnight showing, I went empty handed. I just wanted to sit back and enjoy the ride. The lights dimmed; the film played; the curtain closed and something was planted in my head that has since festered and grown, taking over my dreams and my waking mind. I was compelled to write on what I saw and experienced. I sit here now, needing to share what I experienced, needing to tell as many as I can to run and have the same experience I did. A film has not haunted me so much in quite a while. It is the second of Nolan’s films to make me question reality and have me chattering like a gibbon as I left the theater – Memento was the first. They both messed with my head. Inception is so well tuned, so well structured, the world it creates is complete and nearly perfect. I not only understood, but I could easily manipulate the concepts it showed me so that I could see them every day around me. This is what film is about.

At some undetermined time in the future (or maybe happening now in the present right under our noses) people are able to jack into other’s subconscious and invade their dreams. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the best at doing this and at finding the secrets hidden within those dreams. He is hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe) to place an idea into his business rival’s, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), mind. The request is impossible, the stakes, high, but Cobb needs to do it to gain access back into the United States in order to see his children again. A heist. One last job. So, Cobb puts together a team of people to help him accomplish this task. Ariadne (Ellen Page) is the architect; Yusuf (Dileep Rao) specializes in sleeping potions; Eames (Tom Hardy – stealing every scene he is in) has connections and munitions and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is Cobb’s right hand man. However, what none of them realize is that Cobb has a demon in his head in the form of his ex-wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) that may materialize and wreak havoc while they are working.

The first person that must be praised is writer/director Christopher Nolan. He has proven himself time and again to be the best director working today. Is there any other director whose track record is so clean? He makes films that are great for film geeks and casual filmgoers alike. The critics love him with great reviews and the audiences love him with great box-office. Besides the misstep that is Insomnia, I am hard pressed to think of anyone else who is so prolific and still so successful. Some will say Tarantino but I would argue that Nolan has broader appeal. I really don’t know why more isn’t being said and written about him. He is a master storyteller. No one else would have been able to cram so much information, at such breakneck speed, into two and a half hours without confusing me, and keep me on the edge of my seat. Each piece of information is given at such a time that it either connects to what happened not so long ago, or so that we can use it to unlock the mystery that is about to come. Other directors would have had pity on the “incompetence” of the audience; they would have watered down the plot to help us understand all the information. Nolan drops us in the middle of a story and trusts us to keep up. He doesn’t bother with details that would weigh down the exposition (How can they jack into other people’s dreams?, Who discovered it?, How does it work?) but instead offers it up for us to buy into if we are to follow him.

The editing is the second thing that must be praised. The editing room is the final place that a director “writes”, and as such Nolan’s cutter, Lee Smith, (the one he’s been working with since Batman Begins) is a genius. For thirty to forty-five minutes in the second act of this film there are between four and six different storylines that are going on simultaneously and interrelate with each other. The deft work done here is like juggling chainsaws. If one of the storylines is botched and left behind, the whole movie is ruined. And someone may lose a limb. Added to that is the unbelievable score that Hans Zimmer, three-time Nolan collaborator, produces. It is as unrelenting as the editing. Looking back, I don’t recall more then five minutes tops that did not have music behind it, pushing it forward, raising the tension. There are a few spots in the film where I wished the movie would have slowed down some in order to let us feel the weight of an issue or a decision, and therefore I feel it lost something special in those moments. However, on the whole, it is a dizzying display of expert editing.

DiCaprio does better here then he has done in quite a while, perhaps because he’s not butchering some accent. His guilt ridden scientist is very similar in tone to the guilt ridden cop he played in Shutter Island. He is perfect in this role. After discovering Tom Hardy in 2008’s Bronson, I have found every role he’s been in mesmerizing. I’m glad he’s going to be getting a chance soon to be a leading man, I just wish it wasn’t as Mad Max. Joseph Gordon-Levitt keeps choosing amazing material to be in, although I do wish the costume crew didn’t always place him in the same dapper-looking clothes – shirt and tie with a cardigan again? Switch it up a bit, huh? And Marion Cotillard is an unrelenting force here. The inside joke of having the music that wakes everyone up be Edith Piaf (Cotillard’s Oscar winning role) was, I feel, inspired. Through it all, nothing was regretted by these dreamweavers.

Finally I want to discuss a scene that was in the trailer – guys floating around a hotel hallway. For some of it, I am still confused as to how they did it. There are two segments to the scene. The first is the fight, a fight that goes from floor to wall to ceiling to wall to floor with such ease and fluidity that even Fred Astaire, in all his dancing glory, couldn’t have dreamed that film would have come this far. That was incredible and I can’t even imagine how the fight choreographer wrapped his brain around the logistics of bringing that all together. The second is the zero gravity portion, long profound stretches of time where lots of people are suspended in zero gravity. That’s where I get confused. I suppose it could be CG, erase the wires that the actors are hanging from, however it appeared to me to be more of what they did for the Apollo 13 film in NASA’s KC-135 reduced gravity aircraft. But how would they have been able to build an entire hotel hallway, room and elevator into one of those aircrafts? It cooks my noodle, but I love it for doing so.

There are a couple of places where the visuals don’t quite work, where the CG lets the filmmakers down. There is a bit more of The Matrix (people being jacked in, not knowing which is the real reality, heck they even had a hot girl that was a complete fabrication of someone’s imagination) and of Vanilla Sky here then I would have liked to see. And though the ideas may not be completely original, the execution is. How you react to the ending and your interpretation of the entire film is more a reflection of your personality and your outlook on life. It’s awesome for a piece of art to mean so many different things to so many different people. Nolan has given us yet another a film that we will be watching for decades to come.