6. Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried's Kiss Isn't That Exploitative

By the time I saw a screening of Jennifer's Body last week, the "lesbian kiss" clip was already partially online, and seemed just as eye-rollingly marketing department-mandated as one would expect. But it actually fits nicely into the plot — in the full scene, Needy (Amanda Seyfried) is suspicious of Jennifer (Megan Fox), and Jennifer is trying to win her back the only way she knows how — with her overpowering sexuality. Besides, it's played for laughs when Needy suddenly realizes they're kissing and pushes Jennifer away and is all like "Wait, what?" about it.

5. The Diablo Cody-isms Aren't As Distracting As They Were In Juno

Jennifer's Body probably could have done without "Moveon, Dot Org!", but generally, the weird Diablo Cody alien teenspeak is limited to one character — Jennifer — which makes it seem like it's her tic, not the entire movie's. And when I'm watching a horror movie, I like knowing there's always another pop culture allusion just around the corner. This movie isn't trying to be Citizen Kane. I might even start calling my best friends Monistat and Vagisil...well...or not. But teenagers do tend to have their own language, and if it was okay in Heathers, it's okay here.

4. Adam Brody's Dead-On Brandon Flowers Impression

Adam plays the eyelinered lead singer of the indie band Low Shoulder, whose single "Through The Trees" goes platinum after it becomes the official song of the Devil's Kettle Tragedy. Though Adam claims in interviews that he based his character on several famous lead singers, come on, it's Brandon Flowers from The Killers all the way. He even grows a Flowers-esque mustache after he gets famous. It adds another layer to think of his ruthless evil famewhore character being based on Flowers the goodie two-shoes Mormon.

3. J.K. Simmons As the Wig-Wearing Science Teacher With A Hook For A Hand

Because J.K. Simmons is always funny, and because the hook is never explained or even mentioned.

2. Megan Fox....Can...Actually...Like...Act?

Bad news for Megan Fox's legions of haters: she may have dumb tattoos, say silly things in interviews, and possess exactly one mouth-agape red-carpet facial expression, but in this movie at least, Megan Fox's ability to play the full range of her ditzy-yet-utterly-enthralling high school alpha-female character is undeniable. (Amanda Seyfriend is also terrific, but we already knew that.) You just can't stop watching Megan, and after this mesmerizing performance, her sudden massive fame seems a little bit more understandable. I'm sorry if this upsets anyone. It's just true. Bitch can act, and we need to accept it and move on (dot org).

1. It's An Empowerment Movie For Former Wallflower Sidekicks Everywhere

Most of us have, at some point in our lives, found ourselves playing sidekick to an underminer-y, narcissistic, "best friend." (This is based on anecdotal, not scientific, research, but it's totally true.) We tend to grow out of it by our late '20s unless we're characters on Sex and the City, but if the low-self-in-relation-to-Miss-Superstar-esteem memories still linger, Jennifer's Body is THE movie to see to permanently exorcise your inner nerdy sidekick forever. It's a horror movie about toxic friendships! Why didn't anyone think of that before? The last two scenes of Jennifer's Body will make any former wallflower feel like a badass, giving us more than we ever expected from a cheap horror movie: an hour and a half of therapy. See it with a friend you (actually, really) love!

Because it looks like it could be funny? Look, we're not fans of Cody's snappy, reference-laden "writing" any more now than we were when Juno came out or United States of Tara (a show that got better only after Cody stopped writing episodes) debuted. But couldn't that jerky dialogue and look-Ma-no-hands kind of sardonic bravado acquit itself nicely in a silly/scary horror comedy? The Girl Gets Revenge trope worked fairly well in Teeth, and we all remember the nerdy Blockbuster clerk's wet dream that was Scream. Smoosh those two things together and you just might get Jennifer's Body. Something so head-poundingly annoying it's oddly entertaining. Y'know?

[via ShockTilYouDrop]

Lady screenwriters? Just a thought: If you don't want people to fixate on your sexuality maybe don't blurt out to a Times writer, "We've all seen each other naked."

Or call your drunken limousine rides "super porno."

But having talked about your work on a would-be series called Sluts, and having dubbed yourselves "The Fempire," it sounded a bit disingenuous when you all complained about "pressure to look photogenic in a way that is not demanded of male screenwriters."

That's surely true of the Femperors. But these aren't hermit screenwriters, hunkered down in Los Angeles apartments, avoiding the sort of Times reporters who would call them "gorgeous" in the second paragraph.

No, these are women with moxie, and ambition. This profile has the feel of, oh, a group bid to launch some sort of lady Entourage, maybe? The photogenic, novelist author of the Times piece would fit snugly into such a project.

Whatever their specific dreams, Entourage-scale aspirations will be judged with the likes of Adrian Grenier and Jeremy Piven in mind. As Cody knows all too well, making those sorts of references and comparisons is utterly second-nature to viewers. And one suspects Cody and her friends, despite protestations to the contrary, don't need to be reminded of it.

In perhaps the most notorious example of a suddenly superfluous tattoo, Johnny Depp had "Winona Forever" inked onto his arm in a tribute to then-fiancée Winona Ryder. Depp eventually had his tattoo changed to read "Wino Forever," eschewing the somewhat more enigmatic, possibly golf-related "Win a Fore."


Jude Law quoted the Beatles in a forearm tattoo honoring wife Sadie Frost: "You came along to turn on everything, Sexy Sadie." The two divorced after six years of marriage, and Law has covered up the lyric with a tattoo of a heart.


As soon as Juno was released, Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody announced that she was single and looking to mingle with all eligible homeskillets by inking over her husband's name.


Instead of covering up her "Billy Bob" tattoo, Angelina Jolie simply had it lasered off after she split up with Billy Bob Thornton. In response, Jennifer Aniston finally rubbed off a Magic Marker tribute to Tate Donovan on her inner thigh.


Tom Arnold had a variety of terrifying Roseanne-related tattoos inflicted onto his body when the two were married, including one on his hindquarters. All four tattoos have reportedly been lasered off; we are declining to look for visual proof and will take him at his word.


When Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee split, she had her ring finger tattoo modified from "Tommy" to "Mommy." No word on whether Lee was able to cover up the "Pamela" he had tattooed onto his penis; if there are any groupies out there with Hep C and stories about a schlong scrawled with "Penisla," let us know.

· Bob Iger, on the other hand, had an 11% sweeter 2008 than the year before. He's the happiest honcho on Earth!
· Vulture casts The Miracle of Flight 1549, with the unusual choice of The Magnetic Fields's Stephin Merritt in the role of that talkative dude you might have have seen here, or on just about any other news outlet in the hours following the emergency landing.
· Does anyone recognize Wheelie Boy from the 1971 motocross documentary On Any Sunday? Somebody's looking for him.
· Wondering where Lonny Ross was in last night's 30 Rock? Well then, stop fast forwarding past the commercials!

The pilot is now streaming at the Showtime website (type in TARA when prompted for a password). What Cody has come up with is Tara, a depressive housewife and muralist-for-hire, played by Toni Collette with the open-mouthed neediness she's capitalized upon since Muriel's Wedding. But unlike Muriel, there's nothing here to make us particularly care about Tara. She's not quite pathetic enough, or crazy enough, or manipulative enough. She possesses none of the guile or sex appeal that made Mary-Louise Parker's pot-dealing mom in Weeds so instantly engaging, none of the ferocity and purposefulness of the women at the center of The Closer and Damages, none of the stifled ambition propelling the Mad Men girls. Tara might talk a lot, but she arrives utterly inert, without any reason to exist.

What Tara does have, however, is a hook. She suffers from dissociative identity disorder, a very real affliction which in Hollywood's hands always seems to offer actors a showcase to flaunt one's broad-ranged capacity for flimsy stereotyping. Why perform one character well, the thinking seems to go, when you can instead embody a half-dozen lazily rendered caricatures, spanning generations, socio-economic backgrounds, and colorful slang lexicons?

And so, just as the mind starts to wander away from the neither remarkable nor well-observed struggles of Tara, her long-suffering and sketchily motivated husband Max (John Corbett), and their two Junospeak-afflicted children (we meet the daughter shortly after she's taken the Morning After pill; their teenage son, meanwhile, is forced to utter the line, "Aunt Charmaine is a hosebeast," among other humiliations), we're introduced to Tara's alter egos: T, the slutty tween, Buck, the trash-mouthed trucker, and, in a future installment, Alice, the happy 1950s homemaker. We'd prefer a Hills marathon, a Larry the Cable Guy special, and some Leave it to Beaver to this. At least there's some authenticity in that artifice.

Of signing on for the series, Collette has said, "I never even contemplated working in TV. And this script arrived and as soon as I finished it I closed the last page and said, 'I have to do this.' It's so well-written, it's like a dream job." We hope that was T talking, because watching the finished product was also something of a dream—one of those meandering and pointless dreams that seems to last forever, but fails to provide a single memorable moment when it's over. The United States of Tara isn't just bad. It's bad four times over.

• The United States of Tara [sho.com]

Boomp3.com

At the 12th annual Hollywood Film Festival awards, popular culture impresario Diablo Cody decided to celebrate Halloween a few days earlier, doing her best zombie walk down the red carpet. Cody described herself as a fresh zombie, just a couple of hours old, but also felt she could go another way with her outfit. Cody said, “It’s a tad Stepfordy too. Like if Pris from Blade Runner was somebody’s wife.”

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

"I was getting contacted by so many people regarding the plight of young pregnancy that I was beginning to think I was the leading obstetrician in this country or something," Diablo said at the MTV Networks Election Effect Panel Discussion in NYC.

She laughed off questions about her teen comedy "glamorizing teen pregnancy."

"If I would have know that I wielded that kind of power, I would have written a movie called Don't Vote for McCain," Diablo joked.

Later, Cody opined on Sarah Palin:

"I think Sarah Palin is creepy actually," Diablo says. "Creepier than McCain. But you know I think my beliefs have been very liberal my entire life, so naturally I'm voting for Obama. I used to think that McCain wouldn't make a bad President to be honest, but I think this election has exposed so much ugliness that its just cemented my beliefs."

Perhaps if Sarah Palin traded in her rimless Kawasakis for a pair of pink, heart-shaped sunglasses, the Republican ticket could see eye-to-eyewear with the Oscar-winning writer, but until that day comes, it appears that Cody is firmly on Team Letterman. And John? Don't even attempt a rebuttal. Diablo is simply better at this than you.

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Diablo Cody: Influence Broker? [OK!]

"Comedy should only be written about sensitive subjects."

"That's my philosophy. To say that we shouldn't have comedies about sensitive subjects is to denigrate comedy. Which to me is a very high art form."

It remains to be seen if this series will fulfill the promise of Juno and establish Cody as the great screenwriting voice of her generation, or if a surface treatment of a serious subject and penchant for dialogue like, "Craptards, mom! Dov Berkleman is coming over tonight to Schoolhouse my Rock, and I need to know if you're the 18-year-old slut or the 58-year-old clarinetist. For seriousballs!" will ultimately leave Tara viewers and Diablo fans alike severely disappointed.

• United States of Tara Preview [/Film]

I may have won 19 awards that you don't feel I earned, but it's neither original nor relevant to slag on Juno. Really. And you're not some bold, singular voice of dissent, You are exactly like everyone else in your zeitgeisty-demo-lifestyle pod. You are even like me. (I, too, loved Arrested Development! Aren't we a pretty pair of cultural mavericks? Hey, let's go bitch about how Black Kids are overrated!)

Much, much more, after the jump:

I'm sorry that while you were shooting your failed opus at Tisch, I was jamming toxic silicon toys up my ass for money. I get why you're bitter. I took exactly one film class in college and— with the curious exception of the Douglas Sirk unit—it bored the shit out of me. I also once got busted for loudly crinkling a bag of Jujubes during a classroom screening of Vivre Sa Vie. I don't deserve to be here. We've established that. But I'm here. Five million 12-year-olds think I'm Buck Henry. Accept it.

(Incidentally, if you were me for one day you'd crumble like fucking Stilton. I am better at this than you. You're not strong enough, Film_Fan78. Trust me.)

I'm sorry to all those violent, semi-literate fanboys who hate me for befriending their heroes. I can't help it if your favorite writer, actor, director, or talk show host likes me. Maybe you would too, if we actually met.

I know my name is fake and that it annoys you. What, do you hate Queen Latifah and Rip Torn, too? Writers and entertainers have been using pseudonyms for years. Chances are, you're spewing bile under an assumed screen name yourself. I'm sorry if you think I'm like some inked-up quasi-Suicide Girl derby cunt from 2002, but I like my fake name. It's engraved on an Oscar. Yours isn't.

...In summation: you try it.

Having finally bitten the heads off her skeptics like a possessed, near-nude Megan Fox, Cody was content, though her example inspired backlashed Garden State auteur Zach Braff to make his own go of it. Resuscitating his long-dormant Xanga with a post entitled, "Hey Ya! (Outkast)," Braff went after the legion of Garden State lovers who had turned on him like a manic pixie dream girl gone fickle. "Does your People's Choice Award nomination say Zach Braff on it?" he wrote. "I don't think so. Laterzzz! (mood: ebullient)"

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Hello Again! (Starring Shelly Long) [Myspace]

“Well, that year my boyfriend broke up with me, and I decided—oh man; sorry, Mommy!—that I was in love with this girl that worked at the Body Shop [a strip club on Sunset Boulevard]. I decided that I was going to get her to love me back, and I went out of my way to create a relationship with this girl, a stripper named Nikita. I was there all the time—I would go there by myself. I bought her things—perfume, body spray, girlie stuff. I turned into a weird middle-aged married man. I felt like I had this need to save Nikita. I’d get lap dances so I could get to know her, and I’d give her what I thought were great little sound bites of inspiration—like You can do it, you’re better than this! I didn’t want her to be there.”

...It’s at this point that Fox becomes self-conscious—she seems, for the first time, to have recalled that she’s supposed to be on guard about her personal life—and she starts talking less about Nikita and more about how people are going to judge her for saying she had a relationship with a Russian stripper. “I don’t want it to come off as a Lindsay Lohan vibe. You know?” she says. Then, with greater concern: “Are you going to push an ‘Is she a lesbian’ angle? Oh man, you are going to do that to me.…”

Why, how could Fox imagine that GQ (which titled its article "Megan Fox Was a Teenage Lesbian") would do such a thing? Have a little faith, Megan — and next time, try Jumbo's Clown Room. The drinks are cheaper, and trust us: the strippers are way easier to save (or at least to coerce into a 3am meal of Fred 62's "Mac Daddy & Cheese Balls").

• MEGAN FOX WAS A TEENAGE LESBIAN! [GQ]

Boomp3.com

Pregnant Juno star Jennifer Garner asked if the snappers surrounding her could take about ten big steps back before she entered a medical building. As a woman with child, Garner needs all the space that she can get. Garner added, "I'm showing, not like Minnie Driver showing, but us pregnant women can explode at any moment. And in the best interest of me, you, and your sneakers, let's take a couple of steps back and let move on by."

[Photo Credit: X17 ]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

The guy saw we were anxious but said "WAIT!!! Megan Fox is topless!!!" Well that sold my buddies. Nonetheless not only *SPOILER ALERT* did we not see her topless but the movie was indeed quite awful.

...Megan wasn't horrifyingly bad but neither was she good. There was a scene where it's a real big close up of her kissing another chick (YES!!!!). The men in the audience hooted and cheered even though it was completely random and the director put it in as a a kind of apology for not giving up the real goods (no Megan Fox boobage).

Though we're saddened that we may never see a topless Megan Fox spout Cody-isms like, "You're totally jello! You're lime green jello and you can't even admit it," perhaps it's all for the best. The Jennifer's Body set is only big enough for one stripper, and it's the one with the Oscar.

• 1st Jen's Body review! [JoBlo]

1. The Script Makes Bend It Like Beckham Sound Like Shakespeare: Diablo may have been able to get away with now-sticky phrases like "Honest to blog" and "Phuket, Thailand!" thanks to the plucky work of Ellen Page. But take a gander of these cringe-worthy attempts to make the next "fetch" happen from Angus: "'Oh my giddygodspyjamas" (what she exclaims when she sees a boy she likes), "nunga-nunga holder" (bra) and "Vulgaria!" (the biggest put down). Call us nuts, but we find it hard to get on board with a star whose "As if>!"-esque breakthrough quote-worthy line includes any of the above.

2. Georgia Has No Cokepants Escapades Or Nudity Scandals In Her Future: As she tells the Mail, "I don't think I could handle all that fame and attention...Basically, I like living with my mum and dad, I like living at home, I like school and I'd miss all my friends.'" Oh dear. We're not sure an actress can even get her passport stamped on this side of the pond spouting that kind of saccharine wholesomeness. At least Keira busts out an F-bomb or twelve in nearly every interview she's given.

3. Anyone Who Dares To Neglect Johnny Depp's Pre-Pirates Career Is On Our Shit List: And we don't care how young they are. On the topic of Depp, Georgia gets all gooey-eyed and 'fesses to a crush (permissible), but goes on to say she didn't know who he was before she saw his Keith Richards impersonation in the swashbuckling blockbusters. In our world, that kind of talk is pure sacrilege, even for a 16-year-old.

• MEET MIDGET JONES! GEORGIA'S BEING HAILED BY HOLLYWOOD AS THE NEXT KEIRA KNIGHTLEY [Daily Mail]

• New One-Sheet for Jennifer's Body [ComingSoon.net]

So yes, we highly doubt anyone will be rushing to the theaters next year in some kind of SATC or Devil Wears Prada estrogen frenzy to see Page's uninspiring fashions, but two primary reasons why we think news like that is just grand, come to mind:

1) Early details about Barrymore's first crack at the director's chair reveal character names like Dinah Might, Bloody Holly, and Malice In Wonderland. Which would otherwise be somewhat tacky little gimmicks were it not for (we suspect) Drew's uncanny talent for making any sappy, giggly, poorly written chick flick watchable, and the fact that Juliette Lewis, Marcia Gay Harden and Defamer favorite Kristen Wiig are all co-starring.

2) Nobody likes an estrogen frenzy.

So if Page remains determined to straddle the fine line between bi-curious and going incognito while on the DL using the most unnoticeable boy's clothes to disguise herself, we should really be thanking the bison-fan for preventing yet another endless cluster of pink Manofaux Blahniks crowd our sidewalks every weekend.

[Photo credits: INF]

• ELLEN PAGE WHIPS IT GOOD [Just Jared]

Seth Rogen fires off some pot shots in the new GQ comedy issue. First the funnyguy says that he's the reason — or at least part of the reason — his pal Jonah Hill turned down a role in director Michael Bay's Transformers sequel.

"I can see if Steven Spielberg's calling you, asking you to do something, how that's hard to turn down," Rogen tells writer Alex Pappademas. "But what I said to Jonah was, 'You want to make a movie about fightin' robots? Make your own movie about fightin' robots. You can do that. That's on the table now.' "

So Oscar-winner Cody can likely be excused for answering Spielberg's call; the director is already credited with the story on the Cody-scripted Showtime series The United States of Tara, but their untitled forthcoming collaboration is reportedly "under such tight wraps that even dealmakers involved with the project were in the dark. There are no producers yet attached." We still think Theroux may have had the better day overall, but feel free to call your own shots — short-term, long-term or both — in the comments.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images, WireImage]

• Seth Rogen's 'Transformer'-tive Life Lessons [GQ via E!]

• Cody tackles DreamWorks comedy [Source]

• Jeni, Juno [IMDB]
• Jenny, Juno trailer [YouTube]