Diablo Cody Writes Horrible Movies
There, I said it. She’s a bad writer. The writing in Juno was bad. Jennifer’s Body was the equivalent to your 50 year old dad using slang to sound cool. Just awful. Her columns in Entertainment Weekly are just as bad, which is why I’m baffled as to why people pay her to write.
I know many of you may like the movie Juno. It wasn’t a horrible movie, but the dialogue was. The thing that saved the movie was excellent performances by JK Simmons, Michael Cera and Ellen Page, not the writing that threw in more clichéd phrases than a spoof of teen movies (“What’s your damage?” “Honest to blog” “This is one doodle that can’t be un-did, Homeskillet.”). The story wasn’t all that great but it was something that Hollywood hadn’t overproduced yet. Jennifer’s Body was even worse.
I finally got around to watching it over the weekend and I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece. I was expecting a B movie horror story. Instead what I got was horrible acting by Megan Fox (big surprise there) and laughable dialogue from Diablo Cody. I thought Juno was over the top with the slang, but JB blew Juno away. Cody cannot reasonably believe that normal teenagers talk like that, can she? Seriously, in what world do teenagers say jell-o for jealous or tell someone to move on dot org? When is the last time you heard a teenager say the phrase lesbi-gay? I really think Cody is a mixture of the old dad trying to stay cool using slang that no one uses and the mom who dresses like her daughter to seem young.
I know I shouldn’t come down too hard on her. I’m not a good writer either, but I also don’t get paid to do it. I’m pretty sure I could bang out a script using every slang phrase in the book and make a movie that is just as good, if not better, than Juno or Jennifer’s Body. The only difference between Cody and me is that I’m not a stripper-turned-screenwriter and I think that explains Hollywood’s fascination with her. Hollywood loves success stories and what’s better than a down-and-out stripper hitting it big with a screenplay? Remember, Ben Affleck has an Oscar for writing as well.
eh, I agree and disagree. I thought Jennifer’s Body was terrible. Like, almost as if it was a spoof of horror flicks and not an actual attempt at one…
But I loved Juno. And not JUST for the incredible performances you mentioned. I actually loved the campy dialogue. I don’t think it was at all a realistic representation of teenage life, but I don’t think it was trying to be necessarily. I feel like the emotions are real, what Page’s character (and the others, most notably Jennifer Garner) was real and often heartbreaking. But a ‘homeskillet’ here and a hamburger phone there allowed it to be fun and campy and comedic, to counteract the big issues going on there…
And I love Diablo’s columns in EW (most of the time). It is probably because, of the rotating writers in that spot, she tends to write about the least serious subjects (take, for example her article on her affinity for ‘stupid’ reality shows like Rock of Love). Sometimes I feel like the other writers get too pretentious… I like pop culture, so does Diablo, and I’m okay with that.
Plus she wrote one of my favorite quotes ever- (about 2009) “it was a little like the ShamWow- prone to occasional suckage but mostly bright.”
Can’t beat that.
No. I think whoever wrote the first comment got it right. I’m three pages into the Juno screenplay and I’m thinking, “this garbage won an oscar?!”
I can’t fathom how people think this sort of tripe is clever.
It’s actually pretty sickening. It’s a rapid-fire barrage of shitty dialogue that only people completely divorced from the world could ever think was funny. This not only was MADE in the place of scripts that are infinitely better, but it received praise?! You can’t just slip some zany words into an otherwise pretty banal script and expect it to come out smelling like a… oh wait. If you’re an ex stripper, maybe you can? What people really like is Diablo Cody’s life story, which is really just the juxtaposition of “stripper” and “oscar winning screenwriter”. Maybe next, Harvard medical school will admit a blind, crack-head prostitute. It makes for a great story, doesn’t it?
Did someone slip some acid into the L.A. water table? What’s going on here? It’s like the kid that catches onto hip new dialogue a few years too late read screenwriting for dummies and decided to try his hand. “Hizzie Fa-chizzie, yo. that is soooo sick!”
sooooooo contrived. I’ll be shaking my head for years
real comedy is based off of the situation, or off of some situation. zanny words in a vacuum posing as quirky and clever…. that’s just
99% of the slang is way too tubular to be uttered by normal teenagers. That being said, I had a girlfriend who was 15 a couple years ago (dont worry, I was a teenager then too) and they had some sort of gaystraight alliance thingy and it was called lesbigay… i kid you not. granted this was after juno came out so perhaps they got it from juno, not the other way around…
My Lord, you are spot on. The movie was an absolute piece of shit, Cody’s view on teenage pregnancy is laughable. The dialogue in both movies made me cringe although I’d have to give jennifers body a clap for the level of horror it displayed other than that another movie by Diablo Cody and I’ll be sure to miss it!