"Megan Fox terrorizes her school in ''Jennifer's Body'' -- and we're naming the honor roll of the greatest high school flicks ever, from ''Fast Times at Ridgemont High'' and ''Grease'' to ''Mean Girls'' and ''Ferris Bueller'' -- leading up to our No. 1": 25. HOOSIERS (1986)
Most school movie jocks are belligerent bullies. But Jimmy Chitwood (Maris Valainis) is part Larry Bird, part Rain Man, letting the swish of the basketball net do his talking. Hoops-crazed Hickory, Ind., adores him for it. His support of embattled Coach Dale (Gene Hackman) sways the town, and his skill transforms Dale from goat to genius. In the championship game, the Brylcreemed god overrules Dale's last-second strategy with three words: ''I'll make it.'' Definitely. —Jeff Labrecque 24. RUSHMORE (1998)
For some reason, Rushmore doesn't quite feel like a high school movie. Maybe that's because director/co-writer Wes Anderson's wonderful comedy doesn't feel like any other movie ever made. But it's about school days: Just the fact that Jason Schwartzman's tirelessly enterprising Max Fischer is a student at all becomes palpably bittersweet, since he's too young to ever win Olivia Williams, the teacher of his (and anyone's) dreams. —Gregory Kirschling 22. AMERICAN PIE (1999)
A frivolous teen comedy that left its mark: Jason Biggs taught us the dangers of webcam misuse (and baked-goods abuse), while the guy who'd become Harold — or was it Kumar? — popularized the term MILF. Pie was both funnier and bawdier than Porky's, though that 1981 romp gets points for Kim Cattrall's outrageous orgasm scene. But even she can't top Alyson Hannigan's perfect delivery of the line (all together now): ''This one time? At band camp?'' —Hannah Tucker 21. GREASE (1978)
Still the top-grossing film musical ever, Grease may look too pure to be ''pink,'' but listen to those lyrics (and watch John Travolta ogle Olivia Newton-John in ''You're the One That I Want'') and you may find yourself blushing. Beneath the karaoke-heaven soundtrack lies a story with teen pregnancy, ''pussy wagons,'' and a TV personality trying to put an aspirin in a girl's Coke. Naughty but harmless, it's just like high school should be. —Mandi Bierly20. DEAD POETS SOCIETY (1989)
Perhaps the finest movie in a shockingly sparse mini-genre: the high school weepie. (After all, high school makes you cry sometimes.) Here, if Robert Sean Leonard's suicide doesn't get you (''My son! My son!''), then the ending — Ethan Hawke's stirring ''O Captain! My Captain!,'' Maurice Jarre's blaring bagpipes, and teacher Robin Williams' ''Thank you, boys, thank you'' — will. Only somebody too cool for school could resist. —Gregory Kirschling 19. THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971)
Peter Bogdanovich's black-and-white film takes us to the tumbleweed burg of Anarene, Tex., where Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, and Randy Quaid vie for Cybill Shepherd, the town's No. 2 seductress. (Her mom's No. 1.) These horny, angst-ridden teens deal with sex, mortality, money, and a li'l Texas football by being themselves: subconsciously callous. But the witty banter, mostly by the grown-ups, makes it all less bleak. —Vanessa Juarez 18. ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)
Producer Roger Corman's comedy is a jiggly love affair set at Vince Lombardi High and centered on matchmaker Eaglebauer (Clint Howard), whose office is a men's room stall, and ''Riff Randell, rock & roller'' (pre-Stripes hottie P.J. Soles), who must rebel against Principal Togar (Mary Woronov) to see a forbidden — and very excellent — Ramones show. Think Spinal Tap and Dazed and Confused skipping study hall together to get stoned. —Jason Adams17. PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986)
Would you change anything if you could relive high school? Possibly hook up with that beatnik of a guy you always wondered about? Until Chevrolet makes an actual plutonium-powered time machine, we'll have to live vicariously through this humorously goofy Francis Ford Coppola flick, in which Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) goes back in time to figure out whether pompadoured heartthrob Charlie (Nicolas Cage) is her one and only. —Vanessa Juarez
15. CARRIE (1976)
School can be terrifying, especially when you're an awkward telekinetic teen whose mother is a loony religious zealot. Poor Carrie White can't even get through P.E. class without being viciously mocked by her peers. But in this Brian De Palma classic, the wallflower eventually gets her revenge in the spectacularly gory prom climax (even disposing of a Kotter-era John Travolta). Sissy Spacek's Oscar-nominated turn in the title role is pure, silent rage. —Tim Stack 14. DONNIE DARKO (2001)
There are funnier high school movies, and ones with better soundtracks and more nostalgic value, but how many of those deal with time travel, alternate universes, fate, God, free will, therapy, censorship, teenage angst, falling airplane engines, pedophilia, and a scary freaking bunny? Point made. And while we still don't necessarily understand it all, few films deal so matter-of-factly with the sheer dread (both literal and metaphoric) of teen life. —Gilbert Cruz13. HIGH SCHOOL (1968)
Although it was added to the elite National Film Registry the same year as 2001 and Chinatown, Frederick Wiseman's documentary is — like many of his fly-on-the-wall nonfiction films — extremely difficult to find on video. But it is essential. Thirty years before reality TV, Wiseman took his camera to Philadelphia's Northeast High School and shot what was there, editing it, without narration, into a devastating indictment of bureaucracy and enforced conformity. —Gregory Kirschling12. MEAN GIRLS (2004)
There was a time when Lindsay Lohan was best known for her acting rather than her party-hopping. Showcasing La Lohan in arguably her best role to date, this Tina Fey-scripted film also boasts a breakout turn by Rachel McAdams as evil queen bee Regina George (''Gretchen, stop trying to make 'fetch' happen! It's not going to happen!''). While Mean Girls is technically a comedy, its depiction of girl-on-girl cattiness stings incredibly true. —Tim Stack 11. SAY ANYTHING (1989)
Go on: Hoist that boom box above your head and turn up ''In Your Eyes.'' Stand motionless with a fixed expression of unrequited but determined love. And watch Cameron Crowe's ode to young passion, which made John Cusack the thinking teen's heartthrob and should have done the same for Ione Skye. If the postgraduation romance between an earnest kickboxer and a sheltered valedictorian doesn't win you over, repeat steps one and two and listen closer. —Hannah Tucker 10. FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF (1986)
Who didn't want to be Ferris in 12th grade? Who wouldn't want school to be a magical place where you could wake up and call in sick (with an awesome hacking-cough keyboard) and then see your name in a get-well-soon message painted on the side of a water tower by lunch, all while you were cruising through Chicago in a red Ferrari? Thanks to Matthew Broderick as Ferris, teenagerdom has never felt more fun or mythic. —Gregory Kirschling 9. ELECTION (1999)
Before taking on geezers (About Schmidt) and oenophiles (Sideways), director Alexander Payne in Election scabrously exposed the most embarrassing shortcomings of high schoolers in an artful, hilarious way. He doesn't go easy on anybody — not Matthew Broderick's weak, meddling teacher, nor Reese Witherspoon's Fargo-accented student-council-president candidate. In fact, Election is as mean as high school at its worst. —Gregory Kirschling7. CLUELESS (1995)
It's a rare movie that makes you want to befriend the prettiest, most popular girl in school. But not all girls are Cher (Alicia Silverstone), who gets as many killer lines as fashion ensembles, learns that seeing the best in others is a way to better yourself, and discovers the joy of shopping with a well-dressed gay man — all at the ripe age of 15. Credit writer-director Amy Heckerling for making this modern-day Emma consistently smart and funny. —Mandi Bierly
6. AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973)
Graffiti's cast of teens — including Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard — has serious decisions to make on a late-summer night filled with rock music and hot rods, the kind that can only be made if they stay up 'til dawn. Should they ditch town for college? Should they stay with their gals? Whatever the choice, it infuses this most innocently joyous eve-of-adulthood film with that bittersweet feeling of leaving one's childhood behind. —Gilbert Cruz 5. HEATHERS (1989)
For those who dream about offing an obnoxious classmate, Heathers is the ultimate fantasy. Full of mordant wit, shocking violence, and savvy performances by Christian Slater and Winona Ryder, the flick was the antithesis of the earnest '80s John Hughes films — you'd never see Molly Ringwald serving up a kitchen-cleaner cocktail for Ally Sheedy. Even today, Heathers' spin on cliques, teen suicide, and homosexuality still has bite. —Tim Stack 4. REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)
''You're tearing me apart,'' Jim Stark (James Dean) howls at his parents. For the new kid in school, it doesn't get any easier. Though he finds a friend in the extremely troubled Plato (Sal Mineo), Stark gets into it on his first day with a gang of bullies, in a knife fight and later in a chickie run. Dean was a refreshing change from the well-scrubbed teens of earlier Hollywood films. Here was a character young audiences could finally recognize. —Vanessa Juarez 3. DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)
Matthew McConaughey's Wooderson likes high school girls because even though he gets older, they stay the same age. We feel the same way about Richard Linklater's minutiae-filled comedic epic about the last day of school in 1976 — we may get older, but Dazed is ageless. And for a movie featuring so many stoners, Dazed is mammothly ambitious: Few other films say as much about starting, sticking around in, and leaving high school. —Gregory Kirschling 2. FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)
When screenwriter Cameron Crowe went undercover to observe the species Teenagerus americanus, he returned with more than the usual grab-bag of anecdotes about horny, apple-pie-humping guys and the popularity-obsessed girls who must fight them off with a stick. He returned with 24-karat truth. To watch Fast Times today is to know exactly what it felt like to be fixated on sex, drugs, and rock & roll in Southern California circa 1982. It also launched careers and dished out still-relevant life lessons: Jennifer Jason Leigh (relax your throat muscles when fellating a carrot), Phoebe Cates (always knock before entering a bathroom), and Judge Reinhold (see above). And Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli, with his checkerboard Vans and bong-hit grin, was a geyser of catchphrases (''Aloha, Mr. Hand!''). 1. THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985)
We see it as we want to see it — in the simplest terms, the most convenient definition: The Breakfast Club is the best high school movie of all time. It may lack the scope of its peers — the drinking, the driving, the listless loitering in parking lots — as well as any scenes that actually take place during school. But if hell is other people — and high school is hell — then John Hughes is the genre's Sartre, and this is his No Exit.
The concept is simple: one Saturday detention, five unhappy teens, and their scramble to prove they're each something more than a brain (Anthony Michael Hall), an athlete (Emilio Estevez), a basket case (Ally Sheedy), a princess (Molly Ringwald), and a criminal (Judd Nelson). Following the farcical fluff of Sixteen Candles, the issues Hughes explored — sex, drugs, abuse, suicide, the need to belong to something — were surprisingly subversive and handled with bracing, R-rated honesty. '''Kids movie' was a derogatory term,'' recalls Nelson, ''and Hughes was definitely not making that.'' Thus, 21 years later, the film still sparks intense debates about the trials of teen life. (Sheedy's goth freak gets a makeover, then gets the guy: well-earned happy ending or antifeminist propaganda? Discuss!) Source: www.ew.com
"Heritage brand Original Penguin have released a collection with new premium denim, something the brand has not done in a while. The highlight of these new additions is the selvedge jeans, with exposed trim on the back pockets, that come in a loose relaxed fit. The collection revolves around the theme of a journey through Americana". Source: www.denimology.co.uk Jake Gyllenhaal wears a red Original Penguin golf shirt in GQ.
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The navy blue Earl polo has contrast white piping and the iconic Original Penguin logo featuring on the left pocket". Source: www.celebfashion.co.uk “I’m sure a lot of people would want to try the chic and rocking style of fashionable celebrities like Jake Gyllenhaal, Matthew McConaughey, and Adrian Grenier”, says Lao.
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"Jennifer's Body" (2009), directed by Karyn Susama ("AEon Flux", "Girlfight"), written by Diablo Cody ("Juno", "The United States of Tara"), and produced by Jason Reitman ("In God We Trust", "Thank you for smoking", "Juno") is a horror dark comedy, starred by two of the most fetching upcoming young actresses who recently are being recognized as stars: Megan Fox ("Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen", "Transformers", "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen", "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People", "Jonah Hex") and Amanda Seyfried ("Mean Girls", "Alpha Dog", "Mamma Mia!", "Chloe", "Letters to Juliet"), both leaving behind co-starring with Lindsay Lohan in two teenage comedies. Although having a different approach towards their acting stagecraft, Megan and Amanda share a very suggestive physical beauty and an increasingly large fanbase.Amanda Seyfried plays Anita/Needy Lesnicky, 17 years old, a nerdy attractive student, a National Merit scholar, and Megan Fox as her best friend Jennifer Check, a sexy Flag Team Quarterly cheerleader, since they were preverbal, practically sisters. Needy watches Snow Flake Queen Jennifer with admiration during her cheerleader parades in Devil's Kettle ("Jennifer told me track was for lezzies"), a small town in the rural Minessota. Diablo Cody called herself "middle class trash from the Midwest" in one of her myspace blogs.
Cody also is a "horror junkie", saying to L.A. Times: "There's the idea of the adolescent femenine mystique being inherently creepy".
Most of the shooting was filmed in Canada, and the school setting scenes at University Hill Secondary School, Vancouver.There is another Canada-USA film "Ginger Snaps" (2000), directed by John Fawcett, which has many points thematically in common with "Jennifer's Body". In "Ginger Snaps" two sisters obsessed with death and gothic imagery, when one of the girls experiences her first menstruation, a metaphor for puberty/monstruosity is latent within the plot. Ginger (who is transformed into a serial boy dater/attacker) confides in her sister plain-Jane Brigitte: "I get this ache, and I thought it was for sex; but it's to tear everything to fucking pieces!".The motif of two best girl friends in the cinema, being one the dominant sex lurer (Nikki Reed in "Thirteen", whose director Catherine Hardwicke talked about homoeroticism between Evie and Melanie, Drew Barrymore in "Poison Ivy", Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer in "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with me") and the other a shy duckling ("Ugly Ashley"/Little Needy in this story), solicits the viewers to cull one of the two, when the predatory girl reclaims the biggest part of their common Lebensraum."I've climbed through Jennifer's window so many times. But tonight, only one of us is going to come out" -a determined Needy recalls.Like in "Juno", Needy and Jen live in a conventional provincial town and construct her word games, by turns: ostentious, crass, discombobulated, lesbigay, salty, (lime green) jello, move-on dot org, tragedy boner, Hello Titty, Zombitch, etc. Also here is a reference to Hole ("Jennifer's Body" is the song that gives the movie its title) as in "Juno" Ellen Page's character bonded with Jason Bateman's playing another Hole's song. Instead of a cheesy burger phone, Needy's friends Jennifer and Chip love sea creatures in film, as Orca and Aquamarine.Leah (Olivia Thirlby, Juno's benign cheerleader sidekick) is now a mega sassy, rather negative figure in her equivalent Jennifer.
The soundtrack is full of self-explanatory tunes as "Finishing School" by Dashboard Confessional, "Toxic Valentine" by All Time Low, "I'm not gonna teach your boyfriend" by Black Kids, the conducting theme "Through the trees" ("Heal the ruins left inside you") by Low Shoulder and a bonus: "Violet" by Hole.Needy is owlish, bookish looking, and Jennifer is the local beauty, with a bodacious build and ebullient sexuality, she's locacious and irreverent towards everybody in school since she thinks she's a cut above their class mates. The two girls feel outcasted in highschool for different reasons, Needy and Jennifer call Monistat and Vagisil each other.Needy is interested in Chip Dove (Johnny Simmons, "Evan's Almighty", Young Neil in "Scott Pilgrim vs the world"), the nerdiest boy in the town who plays the snare drum in the pep band gigs at High Basketball. He's a reminded or Bleeker in "Juno", although a bit less paralyzed than Michael Cera. He's a mix of mama's boy and clueless first lover wannabe, buying Sensual Swirl orange condoms at Super Target. Chip adores Needy but is also intrigued by Jennifer's sexual exhuberance, a fact that Needy resents profoundly, and therefore it forces her to make her doubt for first time of the nature of her umbilical friendship with Jennifer. There is a well defined prolepsis here in a flashback structure, narrating the progression from an innocent friendship to more adult kiss games that show us how Jennifer exerts an underlying sexual control over Needy ("We can play boyfriend/girlfriend"), although Jen would never confess that control is rooted in her ditzy insecurities and underestimation of Needy which impulses her to want to be always in the center of attention or even to intrude in Chip and Needy's relationship."It smells like Thai food in here. Have you guys been Phuck-ing?" -Jennifer asks with her usual blunt vulgaris quips.This contradiction between Jennifer's sexual self-awareness and her desire to achieve a level of maturity that Needy brings off naturally would explain why Jennifer (victim of peer pressure over her image) is destined to become the villainess of the story, whereas Needy is the rough diamond, the smart cookie with a heart of lead and a steel will.Adam Brody ("The Ring", "Thank You for Smoking", "The O.C.") plays the lead singer of Low Shoulder, Nikolai Wolf, sporting a smooth gait and dyed black hair, and Juan Riedinger is the reluctant bassist Dirk. The unknown group aspires to make a Faustian deal involving rituals with a sacrificed virgin. The détonant for this irreversible conversion of pretty Jennifer to evil zombie vamp is after a Chrysler Sebring ride to a concert inside The Melody Lane, a small dive where our girls drink Peach Schnapps, play inexperienced groupies for this sleek band (famous in MySpace), under the jealous eye of the local boys and police officer Roman Duda (Chris Pratt) who dislikes these city "faygos".
The idea of rockers looking for fame at any cost was jocosely exercised in "Oh, God! You Devil" (1984). But these are callous Maroon 5 wannabes who print out a satanic ritual found through a Google search. After this macabre offering to the Devil goes awry, the sacrificial victim, Jennifer (who isn't "even a back-door virgin"), begins to lose her beauty and energy. To regain it back, she needs to prey on her school "morsels"/courters. She can flick a Zippo lighter and lick the flame with her tongue without burning it, flaunting of her new skills to a scared and distrusting Needy.
-Needy: I thought you only murdered boys.
-Jennifer: I go both ways.The actress Megan Fox has expressed her bisexuality and how she refers to men as boys due to her "superiority complex" towards them. She's the ideal performer to flesh Jennifer out in a hyperreal sense and to sell it us.When Jennifer transforms into a literally drop-dead gorgeous man-eater succubus (thanks to make-up artist Greg Nicotero and KNB's CGI effects), her eyes sparkle like a reptile's. Her snaky teasing victimizes young men, taking over the domineering male reins. Some species of lizards which reproduce by parthenogenesis, whose non-fertilized eggs grow into adults, no longer have males.
In the book by Donald J. Greiner "Women Without Men: Female Bonding and the American Novel of the 1980s", Nancy Chodorow is quoted: "...a female's adult relationship with a male is unlikely to provide total satisfaction."
"Many female friendship films", as Teresa de Lauretis has suggested, "are resolved in ways that are beneficial to patriarchy." ("In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films", by Karen Hollinger).Amanda Seyfried excels in this story as the dorky babe who feels initially betrayed by the lupine Jennifer, but who overcomes her shock and doesn't mind tasting the dark side while defending her classmates from a deadly fate.Seyfried's expressive silvery blue eyes encircle a splendid dimension of demure, unassimilable pain and final acceptance of her own dippy cruelty, which deters her from pitying Jennifer. Her small world is destroyed when she realizes the outré version of her sandbox friend ("You were never a good friend... you used to steal my toys"), and the monstruous Jennifer, towards whom she felt hopelessly "needy", was almost the same.
Amy Sedaris ("Strangers with Candy", "Snow Angels") is Toni Lesnicky, Needy's mom, a "Ford-tough mama-bear" addicted to Lunestas for sleep, overworked and enslaved to swinging shifts. Kyle Gallner plays the goth kid (complete with piercings and Hot Topic wardrobe) Colin Gray who has a crush on Needy and a fatal lust for Jennifer. J.K. Simmons (Spider-Man, Juno, Rendition, Extract) is a quirky teacher with a robotic hand who again is a smashing asset in the movie.Cody's script, a self-described “crazy, chaotic homage” to the horror films of her youth, is so hilarious at moments that it mollifies the typical oppressive moments that plague this genre. There is an homage to "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", when the beauty in danger hysterically begs a bunch of yobbos. Needy's '80s-style magenta dress and her entrance wearing a blood-tinged bodice at her prom, while she's looked down by her classmates as a "clumpy" figure, is an updated deference to "Carrie". A victim-to-be singing in a car is a wink to one scene from "The Silence of the Lambs". "Heathers" is present in the Heather Chandler treatment that Cody gives a transferred Jennifer or the gullible jock Jonas. "Is that my Evil Dead t-shirt?" is a reference to Sam Raimi's horror classic. Also I thought of an 80's vampire movie "The Lost Boys" ("You'll never grow old... you'll never die. But you must feed!")."My skin is breaking out. It's like I'm one of the normal girls", Jennifer whines to Needy, who is irritated at being seen only as normal. But she's far from normal, she's special for Chip, and her showdown against Jennifer at the high school prom Turnabout dance, for defending her wonky boyfriend, will make her a ruthless fighter."But horror is a surprisingly feminist genre", Cody said. "The last person standing is usually a woman. And most of the guys in this movie are vain and insecure. You'll notice there are no fathers in this movie. I didn't want there to be any male role models..."Jennifer needs all of us to be frightened and hopeless in order to feel more alive herself, at least alive for a bit longer. That's the prize of seduction, of a physically pleasing façade going to pieces. She must devour us before we use all her body up. Needy is the real lead in the story because of her generous range (from submissive to psycho kicker/hitchkicker). When she is confined at Leech Lake Women's Correctional Hospital, she's already scrubbed Jennifer's carnage off her soul, but she still feeds off her wild friend.Karyn Kusama has announced the theatrical version will be slightly different to the DVD's director cut, and that one sequel of Jennifer's Body is a possibility in a few years.
"Megan Fox terrorizes her school in ''Jennifer's Body'' -- and we're naming the honor roll of the greatest high school flicks ever, from ''Fast Times at Ridgemont High'' and ''Grease'' to ''Mean Girls'' and ''Ferris Bueller'' -- leading up to our No. 1":
25. HOOSIERS (1986)
24. RUSHMORE (1998)
22. AMERICAN PIE (1999)
21. GREASE (1978)
20. DEAD POETS SOCIETY (1989)
19. THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971)
18. ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)
17. PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986)
15. CARRIE (1976)
14. DONNIE DARKO (2001)
13. HIGH SCHOOL (1968)
12. MEAN GIRLS (2004)
11. SAY ANYTHING (1989)
10. FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF (1986)
9. ELECTION (1999)
7. CLUELESS (1995)
6. AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973)
5. HEATHERS (1989)_05.jpg)
4. REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)
3. DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)
2. FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)
1. THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985)
