Jennifer's Body

Jennifer’s Body: Written by Diablo Cody (Juno), and starring Megan Fox as —who acts like Angelina Jolie in her Billy Bob Thornton phase—Jennifer’s Body throws a feminist kink into the old blonde/brunette, saint/slut high-school horror movie formula. Evil arrives in the form of an indie rock band called Low Shoulder, which comes to the town of Kettle Falls and commits a cult murder to achieve stardom. Fox is, well, a fox, and teenage boys all over North America will be trying to sneak in under the film’s R rating to drool over her. The sex is strictly soft-core (no nudity, boys). But there’s a long, lingering lesbian kiss, framed in profile as extreme-close-up, between Fox and co-star Amanda Seyfried. And while Fox devours her flesh-eating role with great gusto, Seyfried’s performance is the film’s revelation. She plays the good-girl heroine opposite Fox’s carnal cannibal. But in a modern twist on the formula, this sweet blond is far from virginal. She knows her way around a condom, and may even be having more sex than the bad girl. Seyfried also stars in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, where she gives a dynamite performance in a shape-shifting role as a hooker that allows her to demonstrate remarkable range. Continue…

Must-reads: None. Okay, maybe James Travers.

Did somebody order a hero?
It will take more than bellyfire to lead the Liberal party.

Stéphane Dion’s decision to stay on pending a leadership convention is “a gobsmackingly bad move,” Don Martin declares in the Calgary Herald, predicting he’ll make an easy target for “gloating Conservatives across the Commons aisle while economic issues, which are hardly his forte, dominate parliamentary debate.” Dion may finally realize that “federal politics makes mincemeat of honest, high-road sincerity,” but he doesn’t yet seem to accept his own culpability in the Liberal collapse, says Martin. Given two years to “invigorate the Liberal fundraising operation,” “gel with his caucus and install a solid staff organization,” and “frame the Liberals in the centre with rational mainstream policies,” he did none of those things. The idea that he could help them do so as a “lameduck loser” is, therefore, laughable.

The Montreal Gazette’s Don Macpherson speculates that Dion may be hanging on in anticipation of pulling a Trudeau—i.e., announcing his impending departure, engineering the defeat of the government and then marching to an improbable victory in the 41st general election. If that is indeed his intention, Macpherson advises he be disavowed of it at the party’s earliest convenience. His caucus has neither the money nor the patience to brook such shenanigans, and the various contenders for the crown—Macpherson has Michael Ignatieff as the favourite—would surely lead their troops in revolt.

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Slept in for a change. The Cannes programmers gave us a break today, clearing out the schedule to leave our palates fresh for this evening’s premiere of Che, Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour-plus epic about Che Guevara. For once it was sunny. I was tempted to hit the beach, and almost did. But dark rooms exert an addictive pull in this place, along with the fear of missing something unmissable. So this afternoon I caught the final market screening of Hunger, which opened the Un Certain Regard sidebar last week. It’s a much-buzzed feature debut from British visual artist Steve McQueen (you think he’d at least call himself Steven to avoid confusion with the dead actor on IMDB.)

Hunger is a tough film, highly graphic drama about the 1981 IRA hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. It begins with a no-wash strike—a harrowing, maggot-ridden ordeal of prisoners wearing nothing but overgrown beards who are beaten and tortured in cells while they smear the walls with their own waste. (Yet another example of the bizarre sanitation theme that flows like an open sewer through this year’s Cannes program). The filth and torture sequences, which are almost wordless, are followed by a long, uncut stretch of staccato dialogue between IRA militant Bobby Sands and a priest trying to talk him out of the hunger strike. That scene is a theatrical tour de force. Then we come to the hunger strike itself. It transpires as an ethereal trip into a palliative afterlife, featuring actors with gaping sores who are so alarmingly skinny they could teach the cast of Schindler’s List a thing or two about dieting.

But I had to leave Hunger before the end. I was famished, and desperate to pick up a slice of quiche to-go before heading into Che marathon.

Starring Benicio Del Toro, Che was presented in two parts, two separate movies really, with a 15-minute intermission. The dialogue is almost all in Spanish, with English subtitles. The first part plays like a war movie, and traces Che’s guerrilla campaign through the jungles of Cuba, intercut with black-and-white re-enactments of his visit to the United Nations in N.Y. The second part plays like a thriller, and follows his disintegrating campaign in Bolivia up to his death, another saga of starvation and sickness. It’s hard to imagine either part working without the other. They’re a matched set of victory and defeat, an ascent to revolutionary heaven followed by the descent into hell. The story of defeat is more compelling.

At half time, the lobby was littered with little shopping bags marked CHE, each containing a bottle of water and half a sandwich consisting off a flattened leaf of lettuce and virtually nothing else between slices of squished white bread. An attempt to simulate jungle rations?

A few observations on Che:

• Soderbergh goes so far out of his way not to make a conventional Hollywood biopic that he offers not a shred of personal back story, or front story. Just meticulous history and warfare.

• No one has sex of any sort, or even talks about it, during the entire four hours—except a deserter who rapes a peasant girl off screen. But the men smoke a lot of cigars.

• About an hour a three quarters into the movie, it’s casually mentioned that Che has a wife and daughter in Mexico; moments before his death in the second movie he mentions that he has five children. That’s all we ever hear of them.

• There are virtually no close-ups in either movie. It’s hard to find Benicio Del Toro’s eyes. Everyone has overgrown beards, and things can get confusing.

• For no apparent reason, except to provoke a titter of recognition, Matt Damon pops up in a cameo, speaking Spanish.

• Che is a severe asthmatic. At one point, as he lies gasping from breath in the Bolivian jungle, he says, “All of us have made mistakes but I made the worst mistake when I didn’t bring my medicine along.” So if he’d taken a puffer into the jungle, instead of cigars, could that have turned the tide of history? Clearly he would have been better off making revolution in a desert climate.

• Che’s screenwriter is Peter Buchman, whose previous major credit is a jungle tale of a different colour— Jurassic Park III

I don’t have any video from my own camera today, but here’s some official footage of what was happening at Che’s red carpet premiere:

The stars just seem to shine brighter north of the border. Exclusive pictures of celebrities on the red carpet and in their own habitat (aka hotel rooms) at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Check out Matt Damon, Jennifer Garner, George Clooney and Brad Pitt — erm, with an itchy nose.

Click here for exclusive photo gallery.