FAN BOY: Patton Oswalt in Big Fan.
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JENNIFER'S BODY When Diablo Cody won the Oscar for penning the delightful Juno, I'm assuming it was less for her hip-today-gone-tomorrow dialogue and more for her creation of ingratiating yet recognizably flawed characters as well as her deftness in telling a story with numerous emotional peaks. With her sophomore – and sophomoric – script, Cody has retained the hipster-speak but left out everything else. In Jennifer's Body, the warmth and wit have been replaced with cruelty and denseness, and what might have been a penetrating high school comedy – a new Heathers or Mean Girls – turns out to be nothing more than a cheap horror flick packed with lowbrow titillation. Megan Fox stars as Jennifer, who, after being served up as a satanic sacrifice by the members of an obscure band seeking fame and fortune (hey, it beats taking the humiliating American Idol path), returns as a vampire-zombie-thingie that must gorge on human blood to survive. There's always an audience for revenge fantasies, and perhaps if Jennifer had gone after misogynistic creeps, there'd be more rooting interest for her even given her demonic state. But Jennifer solely seems to target nice guys, which not only makes her a one-note killing machine but also cripples any attempts by Cody and director Karyn Kusama to provide any originality to a played-out genre that has traditionally been owned by male filmmakers. Instead of serving as a much-needed role reversal take on the standard terror tale, Jennifer's Body is merely a sellout, most notably in a pointless scene in which (fanboy alert!) Jennifer and her best friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried) briefly lock lips – a desperate sequence that's about as erotic to behold as Glenn Beck in a wet T-shirt. Seyfried is fine while Fox is dreadful, delivering her lines as if she doesn't quite understand half the words she's uttering. More than anyone else, she's the one who turns Jennifer's Body into a rotting corpse of a movie. *1/2
9 Not to be confused with Rob Marshall's upcoming musical Nine (or, for that matter, with the summer hit District 9), this single-digit offering is actually director Shane Acker's expansion of his own Oscar-nominated short film from 2005. That animated work ran approximately 12 minutes; this new version clocks in at 80 minutes, shorter than most theatrical releases but still thin enough to outstay its welcome by at least a quarter-hour. Set in a post-apocalyptic period caused by a gruesome battle between humans and the machines that ended up turning against them (sorry, no Arnold Schwarzenneger cameo this time around), the plot centers around a doll-like creature (voiced by Elijah Wood) identified by the "9" that's marked on his back. 9 discovers that humanity has been completely eradicated and fearsome mechanical monsters roam the earth, but he has no idea of his own origins or what his future might hold. He meets other rag dolls like himself – a warrior woman (Jennifer Connelly), a kindly scientist (Martin Landau), a scheming elder (Christopher Plummer), a timid sidekick (John C. Reilly), and more – and they argue as to whether they should continue to live in hiding or confront the enemy head-on. It's easy to see why Tim Burton signed on as a producer: The staggering visual scheme is dark, dank and dangerous, and characters often meet unexpected – and undesirable – fates (as the PG-13 rating suggests, this one clearly isn't for the wee ones). But these attributes, atypical for animation, are seriously undermined by a pedestrian end-of-the-world storyline and by characters with zero personality. **1/2
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