Brody In Love: A Tale of Lesbian Heat

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Jennifer's Body could play on both of these aspects. Cody said she wanted the film to speak to female empowerment and explore the complex relationships between best friends. I want to write roles that service women. I want to tell stories from a female perspective. I want to create good parts for actresses where they're not just accessories to men.

She wanted to show the "almost horrific" aspect of such devotion and its relation to parasitism. The producers decided to have the film open with the statement "Hell is a teenage girl" to reflect the "horrors" of puberty and that "the hellish emotions felt during high school often reappear as teenage girls mature into young women". There's the scene where Jennifer's sitting alone smearing makeup on her face. I always thought that was such a sad image.

I don't know any woman who hasn't had a moment sitting in front of the mirror and thinking, 'Help me, I want to be somebody else. Cody crafted the story to follow a night that ends in a tragic fire, after which Jennifer is kidnapped and set up as a sacrifice which goes awry. Jennifer, now possessed by a demon and subsequently altered into a succubus , sets out on a bloody rampage in which she devours boys, and it is up to Needy to stop her.

In sort of a reversal aspect of how puberty changes a girl's life , Jennifer must consume the blood of others once a month or she becomes weak and plain-looking. I think it's always really satisfying and cathartic to see a character that was previously bullied become super human", said Cody. I was never an Alpha female , and I've never gotten off with bullying other people", she said. The nickname "Needy" was given to Seyfried's character to underline the essentially condescending dynamic in Jennifer and Needy's high school relationship, [30] as Needy often admires Jennifer and feels she needs her.

Cody said "Jennifer is a product of a culture that pressures girls to be skinny, beautiful and just like movie stars" and that she "hopes the film inspires girls to take life into their own hands and do with it, what they want". Assigned to direct the film, Kusama said, "I think also a lot of horror is about femaleness — whether it's Carrie or Rosemary's Baby. Addressing her decision to have Jennifer and Needy be romantically intimate at one point during the film, which takes place in the form of a long and passionate kissing scene, Cody said she did not write the scene to score publicity.

The scene was "intended to be something profound and meaningful" to her and Kusama. Obviously we knew people were going to totally sensationalize it. They're beautiful girls, the scene is hot—I'm not afraid to say that. There is a sexual energy between the girls which is kind of authentic, because I know when I was a teen-aged girl, the friendships that I had with other girls were almost romantic, they were so intense. I wanted to sleep at my friend's house every night, I wanted to wear her clothes, we would talk on the phone until our ears ached.

I wanted to capture that heightened feeling you get as an adolescent that you don't really feel as a grownup. Though the film is part comedy, Cody initially intended for it to be a "very dark, very brooding" traditional slasher film. Close to "a third of the way into the process" she felt that she was incapable of doing so because "the humor just kept sneaking in".

She stated, "I have a macabre sense of humor. A lot of the things in the movie that are horrifying are funny to me. So, I actually think comedy and horror are kind of similar in that way. For Jennifer's demonic form, the creators used different techniques. They did a live cast of me from the shoulders up. They created me and then put the teeth in", stated Fox. So it would go from me, then in post-production it would somehow go to her and the fake head. They would mix them all together. For the "vomit scene" where Jennifer has just arrived at Needy's house after being murdered and inhabited by a demon, Fox said the liquid she was given to spit out "was actually Scratch the Hershey's because I don't want to endorse that or anything", she stated.

It goes around the back of my ear and then I bite down on it on the side of my face, like this, and it projectiles.

Directing the scene, Kusama said it had a classic feel. Fox agreed, "Yeah, and it projects whatever that material was. It was pretty intense. I think it was worse for [Seyfried] because she's the one that got puked on. I was the one doing the puking. For more practical special effects on the set as opposed to CG , Kusama said it "was a choice that we all sort of made organically". She said they appreciate "those kind of effects in older movies and [questions] sometimes how much more effective it is to use a ton of CG" and that they "always started with a practical effect and then moved forward from there to lay a groundwork of something that's actually physically, materially there".

They found this to be more enjoyable. Erik Nordby of KNB known for his work on The Haunting in Connecticut , which also features co-star Kyle Gallner stated, "We immediately went into pitch mode in January and spent a solid two weeks trying to not only bid the script but also collect as much reference material and stuff for the first client get together. From there, KNB "produced some tests, grabbing a bunch of stills from [Fox] and [did their] work to indicate how that balance could exist between special effects and visual effects and still maintain a level of subtlety" and that "[MPC] responded really well".

The teams wanted to "maintain some sort of the Megan Fox allure" but said that it was "incredibly difficult because as soon as [they] warped her face in any direction, the shine kind of came off it". To combat this, they ended up focusing on anything below her nose, where they had the freedom to make things "as horrific as [they] needed to" and then above her nose, "[they] could manipulate it somewhat with warps and color correction in her eye sockets. So even at her worst, she had some of that sexiness throughout". Nordby said most of the attention was devoted to Jennifer's face and that "very quickly in combination" with special effects and makeup, MPC thought up a five-station system for what Jennifer goes through.

Stage one is beautiful Jennifer and then two and three were strictly makeup where her eyes become more recessed and she would start to look plain like the rest of us. And stage four was some custom dentures that KNB made for her, and then visual effects in stage four was mainly facial warping and recessing her eyes some more and having a pinning effect to her irises and a variety of other musculature deforms, just bringing her cheek bones down more.

And stage five was the full on, as crazy as it gets, which you don't really see until near the end. During testing, Nordby and the special effects teams realized that getting Fox in and out of the appliance used to create Jennifer's murderous jaw would be too time-consuming. To remedy this, they hired a photo double. He said that "when it came time to shoot any of these jaw moments, [Fox] would act out in rehearsal how she was going to attack her victim and [they would] fine tune that blocking so it was relatively locked".

Additionally, the team would have Fox wear contact lenses and go through exactly the same motions as normal Jennifer. Nordby spent a significant amount of time shooting "the articulating jaw" scene because they had "ultimate control over how the light was hitting the head". He said, "This so-called jaw shot became a pivotal point, because for four months of the post, the filmmakers thought the film was getting too scary so MPC pulled back on the jaw and then they thought it wasn't scary enough.

These different poses helped the two teams perfect the jaw scenes. MPC additionally worked on the disappearing waterfall that serves as Jennifer's grave when she is killed at the beginning of the film. They transformed the mysterious waterfall into a whirlpool. And the night shots play a pivotal role in the film, and we do a huge crane over.

Nordby said, "I eventually lowered down a shot—a ton of reference of the area because I knew we'd have to do some digi-matte work to recreate the basin that the whirlpool ends up in.

During the film's fire scene, Cody appears as a character in the barroom. She had asked to be set on fire.

By the way, they would not allow me to do a full burn for insurance purposes, even though I argued that Burt Reynolds had done it once", stated Cody. To me, there's nothing more horrifying than being stuck in a claustrophobic space as it is burning down so, to me, it was more like tapping into a personal fear. In late , Fox Atomic had plans to film Jennifer's Body before a possible writer's strike. Some of the scenes, particularly those situated in a school setting, were filmed in local Vancouver -area schools such as Vancouver Technical Secondary School , Langley Secondary School and University Hill Secondary School.

Fox said that while filming her highly anticipated kissing scene with Seyfried that Seyfried was "extremely uncomfortable" but that she herself was not. It is a woman. With a woman's smell—soft and floraly—and maybe the pheromones are different.

Something about it felt uncomfortable for me. Music was incorporated as an essential part of the film; there are "very specific bands" placed in band posters in some parts, such as in the selection of the band poster on the walls of the bar. She said, "As the movie progresses, it becomes a pretty clearly music-oriented movie.

It's sort of a youth movie. Some of those bands were totally made up and some of them are not. Film critic Roger Ebert enjoyed the film, dubbing it a " Twilight for boys" and saying "as a movie about a flesh-eating cheerleader, it's better than it has to be". Ebert said that within Cody there is "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". Additionally, he complimented Fox as "[coming] through" in her portrayal and "play[ing] the role straight". He gave the film three out of four stars. It's not hard to imagine she can have anyone who takes her fancy". Charity credited the dialogue as "bitingly smart, funny teen-speak Mary Pols of Time magazine called the film entertaining and reasoned "[t]here is a lot of intelligent camp here, and some sharply observed characterizations" and Cody and Kusama'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".

The Miami Herald 's Rene Rodriguez likened the film's "[effective exploitation] of the genre as a metaphor for adolescent angst, female sexuality and the strange, sometimes corrosive bonds between girls who claim to be best friends" to Brian De Palma 's film Carrie. Scott of The New York Times concluded "the movie deserves—and is likely to win—a devoted cult following, despite its flaws" and "[these flaws] are mitigated by a sensibility that mixes playful pop-culture ingenuity with a healthy shot of feminist anger".

Giving a partially negative review of the film was Joshua Rothkopf of Time Out New York , who said the "movie has a centerfold sheen to it—and some lesbianic soft-core flirtation to match—as its plot dives deeply into Twilight -esque heavy-melo meltdown in the last act" and that "Cody throws one too many losses at Needy; the screenwriter loses her satiric way about halfway through.

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But for a while, this has real fangs". Watch it, forget it, move on". An episode of Murder, She Wrote has more thrills. Michael Sragow of Baltimore Sun described the only "perfect aspect" of Jennifer's Body as being its title. In , Constance Grady reported in Vox that a new critical consensus was forming that appreciated the film as a "forgotten feminist classic".

This, according to Grady, allowed viewers to see the film, rather than as a sex fantasy, as a revenge fantasy as Jennifer uses her abused body against her attackers. Now, Grady wrote, this straight male gaze is no longer the default for film critics and a broader audience. Box-office analysts and critics debated the film's underperformance. Analyst Jeff Bock, of Exhibitor Relations, reasoned the film underperformed at the box office due to two reasons; the first, he said, is the genre.

Bock stated that Americans get horror and comedy, but with the idea "of those two things together in one place, people suddenly get very dumb".

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He noted films Tremors , Slither , Shaun of the Dead , Eight Legged Freaks and The Evil Dead series , and said that while many of those are considered critical and business successes, "none of them have brought in the megabucks that a simple horror or comedy can. Despite other R-rated horror films having centered around teenagers, some such as Scream having been successful, Bock said the second reason Jennifer's Body under-performed at the box office is the R-rating, which he described as a "killer" for the film.

He said the film is set in high school and "sounds like the perfect package for teens" but that "the R rating banned many teens from the theaters" and the studio was left with "an R-rated film marketed to whom, exactly? VanAirsdale of Movieline echoed Sperling's sentiment about the weekend, as "some of the stinkiest high-profile openings in recent memory".

The first, he said, is the distributor. VanAirsdale classified this as a "[b]ig mistake" and that "[y]ou'd have to go back to The Devil Wears Prada to find an example of a Fox release that worked without a genuine male lead; you'd probably have to go back to Aliens to find a genre example of such that they pulled off successfully.

VanAirsdale cited the release date and screening as the third and fourth reasons; he said there was confusion about what day the film was going to debut in theaters, and that Toronto is "a nation removed from the audience where the film's actual momentum had been accruing for at least a month" and that "this rarely works for early fall releases; not because news doesn't travel, obviously, but because it peels away a layer of accessibility that accompanies New York and L. He mentioned Ty Burr 's review in particular, and stated that the film could perhaps have used more horror and been funnier, but that the film is "ultimately a movie about two teenage girls' misadventures in victimization" and that "[t]he jokes are virtually incidental to the friction imposed on women who happen to be two sides of the same coin.

Who's the monster, and who made the monster? Sorry if you wanted Heathers with demons, fellas. Equipment's cheap these days; perhaps make your own? She's young and has a lot of promise. In addition, the album features new songs from pop rock artists such as Cobra Starship and Panic! The album received a 3 out of 5 review from Allmusic , who described the album as having "a slightly different spin, mixing indie with the more expected punk, emo, and metal". The ending sequence of the film itself features a song, " Violet ", from the album Live Through This by Hole.

Where Love Blooms

This same album also features a song entitled "Jennifer's Body. Studios produced a Jennifer's Body graphic novel. The graphic novel expands on the film's universe and Jennifer's murders of the boys.

The novel was released in August The novel features less of Jennifer than the film, but does capture her "going in for the kill" several times. It focuses heavily on following her soon-to-be victims and provides information on their personalities not elaborated on in the film so that readers can better conclude whether the boys deserved to be murdered. The novel consists of four chapters, with a prologue and an epilogue, with art provided for each by different artists.

Each one follows a different boy and what is happening in his life just before Jennifer kills him. On creating the story, Spears stated, "The best part for me as a writer was to show some events from the movie from a different point of view, sort of like Rashomon for you Kurosawa fans. And with comics we can get into the character's heads in a way that works well in comics and novels more so than in film. I was using the medium to change what we really know about these characters and twist around what we see in the movies.

All the academics aside, it's also very funny and gore splattered. Spears stated that while writing the stories, the film was still being made and he had not seen any of it at the time. Fate, however, keeps bringing them together and the paths of their lives keep crossing. Are some differences in personality simply too vast to overcome? Or are some things just meant to be? Laura Baker has just moved to small-town Texas hoping for a life of solitude and recovery after a traumatic event that has scarred her irreversibly. But her chosen isolation is difficult to maintain after she meets Tess Douglas, the charming editor of the town paper.

All they have left is each other. While their shared grief brings them closer, it also takes their relationship in an unexpected direction. What reviewers are saying: You can download Apple Books from the App Store. Overview Music Video Charts. Opening the iTunes Store. If Apple Books doesn't open, click the Books app in your Dock. Do you already have iTunes?

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