Jennifer's Body, written by Diablo Cody of Juno fame, will be released in September.
Megan Fox looks great in the trailer (as you'd expect from a woman whose body came with a hefty price tag) but I have to say I'm tired of the played out storyline: dark-haired-psycho-man-eating-tramp vs. innocent-blonde-angel-saviour-heroine.
It's been done.
I suppose it's no secret Hollywood takes comfort in its formulas, clinging to them like a baby to a rattle. Hollywood is afraid to take risks, afraid to challenge embedded cultural mythologies and afraid to alienate what it perceives to be key demographics.
Hollywood is anti-art.
Hollywood's participation in a project is a death knell to anything truly creative, provocative, controversial, experimental, novel or exciting. It brings in the financing, but with this blessing comes the countless rewrites, excisions, censorship and dilution of the writer's original vision.
Hollywood is like a plastic surgeon who erases character as he instills uniformity.
Hollywood is like Mr. Rogers: sedate, stultifying, stifling and condescending as he offers strange comfort to millions of children (I never liked that guy - he always struck me as the type who put razors in Halloween apples).
Hollywood is like a mid-1950s housewife whose smiles and idle chatter belie her limited, tortured existence.
And Hollywood is a juggernaut: the very definition of success in the entertainment business and the maker and breaker of careers.
But also...Hollywood is ripe for a takedown by a new wave of fresh, young, hungry, restless, agitated, impatient, creative people who won't wait for its permission in order to prove themselves in the entertainment arena.
These New Creatives will tap into a desire people don't know they have and communicate in a language Hollywood won't understand.
Hollywood won't get it.
And as Hollywood attempts to co-opt these new forms of expression, the ensuing backlash will result in an abandonment of the Hollywood-ized product for something completely original.
Maybe one day "Hollywood" will become a dirty word in the entertainment business and taint whatever it touches. People will vaguely recall its glory days of emaciated starlets, bloated executives and empty narratives with a note of derision as they eagerly await the Next Big Thing to come out of God Knows Where.
Until then, I'll watch Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight for the 100th time and revel in the glory that was George Clooney circa 1998. For me it's the perfect movie: beautiful, romantic, exciting, engaging, smart and sexy and nothing in this century has come even close to equaling it.
What if I had stopped...what if I had said something...what if...what if...
