Movie Reviews: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Jennifer's Body, Love Happens

JENNIFER’S BODY A premeditated cult classic — they’re kind of like “preworn” designer jeans — Jennifer’s Body seems designed to be quoted more than watched. This is the sophomore production from Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, similarly told through ultra-stylized slangy teen dialogue, which is cool, in theory, in the way it respects the verbal resourcefulness of idle kids but is excruciating to listen to in actual fact. Megan Fox’s lithe Jennifer is BFF to goldfish-faced, bespectacled Amanda Seyfried’s “Needy” — the nickname underlines the essentially condescending dynamic in their high school relationship, which also digresses into the best close-up girl-girl liplock since Cruel Intentions. Jenny is transformed from a flaunting tease into a literal man-eater, a boy-gobbling succubus, after going off one night in some out-of-town rocker’s van (the movie can read as a cautionary tale on the dangers of trolling for hot band dudes instead of sticking with your schlubby boyfriend), setting up a Good Girl vs. Bad Girl knockdown-drag-out. The suburban interior décor is about a generation off, but the satire is roughly contemporary, with routine “risky” digs at 9/11 kitsch (and, generally, the American “Tragedy boner”) and a re-enactment of the Great White club fire. Lines like “Sandbox love never dies” could be lyrics to the Warped Tour riffs to which Fox slo-mo sashays at the camera. (Citywide) (Nick Pinkerton)

JORDON SAFFRON TASTE THIS! Give Sergio Myers some credit — the man knows his reality TV. The creator of MTV’s proto-Laguna Beach show, Sorority Life, successfully transplants the look and style of the schlocky TV genre for his film, Jordon Saffron — Taste This!, a limp satire of egomaniacal celebrity chefs. Casting himself as the titular restaurateur, Myers eschews a script in favor of improv, which results in scenes that run far past their natural comedic threshold. Someone should have reminded him and his not-quite-ready-for-prime-time cast that they were making a comedy, not a documentary. The best thing about Jordon Saffron is Myers as Saffron, a prat whose expletive-laden rants and complete lack of self-awareness seem as close to Danny McBride in Eastbound & Down as to Gordon Ramsay. The film is raucously funny during Saffron’s professional and personal meltdowns, but the long scenes of repetitive jokes, the dreary reality-TV style and some very strange accents bring down the whole affair. The story of Saffron’s fall and rise as a chic cuisinier riffs lamely on Rocky — even the theme is a heist of “Eye of the Tiger” — but Myers is intelligent enough to know that if his protagonist actually learns anything by the end of this comeback story, then the satire becomes meaningless. Hopefully, the clearly talented Myers will try a different recipe for his next concoction. (Sunset 5) (John Wheeler)

Joe Berlinger’s Crude

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GO  LAILA’S BIRTHDAY Toward the end of Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi’s tragicomedy about daily life in his West Bank hometown, the frustrated protagonist shakes his fists at the heavens and blames the 60-year Israeli occupation for his woes. That’s the only direct polemic in Laila’s Birthday, and this beguiling second feature, after the respectfully received Ticket to Jerusalem, is all the better for keeping its head close to the ground of the surreal business of getting through the day in Ramallah. Veteran Israeli-Arab actor Mohammed Bakri (whose son, Saleh, played the hunky young Chet Baker fan in The Band’s Visit and has a small, but significant, role here) plays Abu Laila, an unemployed judge eking out a living as a taxi driver, who heads out to work at the beginning of the film, charged with bringing home a gift and a cake for his little girl’s birthday. Prickly, unbending and a rigid follower of rules, Abu Laila is hopelessly ill-equipped for the bedlam of a city plagued by corruption, inefficiency and the occasional missile from across the border. Part Tati, part Chaplin, part absurdist satire in the manner of Palestinian director Elia Suleiman (Chronicle of a Disappearance), Laila’s Birthday is beautifully shot and overlaid with a spare, lyrical score that lends rueful emphasis to Masharawi’s exasperated fidelity to a chronically malfunctioning city. (Music Hall)—  (Ella Taylor)

LOVE HAPPENS “The sap pollutes the water, and then they die,” florist Eloise (Jennifer Aniston) upbraids her employee on the importance of cauterizing stems. A similar befouling occurs in the directorial debut of Brandon Camp, who, with Mike Thompson, co-wrote Love Happens — which is not so much a romance as it is a male weepie. Aaron Eckhart plays Burke, a widowed self-help author leading a seminar in Seattle for those mourning the loss of loved ones. The healer isn’t fully healed himself, of course, necessitating emotional helpmeet Eloise, who takes Burke to a poetry slam (only the presence of PDAs reminded me that the film was not set in 1992), the graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee, and the woods of Washington to set a parrot free. Burke’s hollow pop-psychspeak, lightly ridiculed at first, is wholly embraced by the film’s end, if not as adamantly as the outrageous product placements for Qwest and Home Depot, the latter crucial to a seminar attendee’s recovery. Eckhart has even less chemistry with Aniston than he did with fellow narcissist Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2007’s No Reservations, going soft and gooey only when he and Martin Sheen, as Burke’s father-in-law, share a big cry. (Citywide) (Melissa Anderson)