It’s not good. It just ain’t. I caught an early, early screening of this a few months back and had hoped that oh-so-very-much of it had changed, but to no avail. Perhaps in twenty years it’ll be remembered as a cheesy nostalgia flick, but for right now it just comes off as painful. Diablo Cody seems to have been on snooze the entire time, as some of the lines work great, but the vast majority of the script hardly kept me – shall we say? – entertained. Man, I feel bad for saying that. I get the feeling this is “Diablo Via Committee”, and not her at her purest and most cutting form. At its best, the film is on par with Mean Girls or popcorn-satire like A Knights Tale. At it’s worst, it’s like a bad episode of General Hospital. The caricatures of some of these characters (namely the emo kid!) verges onto some real, real tired cliches… are kids really like this? Am I getting too old for this at 25? Why is that kid from ‘Hotel For Dogs’ in this? How come he gets to make out with Megan Fox and I don’t? Is this all “ironic” and I just don’t get it?
Megan Fox, on the other hand, does a great job being Megan Fox. She’s hard to look away from and certainly will be the main draw of this film – but you already knew that because you have “eyes”. Surprisingly, The OC’s Adam Brody does a terrific job playing the singer of an upstart indie band (no, really, cliches abound in this movie), and simultaneously creeps the fuck out of you while charming you into making you want to see more of him in the damn movie. For anyone that remembers him from those heady days of The OC, its a relief to see him playing something that’s NOT a confused Jewish boy who’s super into Deathcab For Cutie. Speaking of which, is Emo the new hair metal? Is this our generation’s “Teen Witch”? Because if it is, if it actually KNOWS how cliched it is, then the movie ain’t half that bad as I’m making it out to be.
My advice? Skip it until it’s on TV. You won’t miss any “big screen magic”, and to be honest I think this’ll find its true audience on the smaller screen anyway; it really is the kind of thing you’d want to watch stoned with a bag of Funyuns. So hey, it’s not all bad, but it’s certainly not GREAT. Given the writing power of Diablo Cody and the screen presence of Megan Fox you’d think this’d be a surefire winner, but it boils down, on the big screen anyway, to a pretty solid B-.
Comments
No comments.