Everyone’s talking about the new R-rated trailer for Jennifer’s Body, a horror comedy starring Megan Fox as a possessed cheerleader. My first impression was that it seems too much like last year’s Teeth, only with less interesting subtext. Alison Willmore of The Independent Eye instead finds the movie reminiscent of 2000’s Ginger Snaps, though she doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. Either way, coming from screenwriter Diablo Cody, Jennifer’s Body doesn’t appear original in any way except for its forced, writerly dialogue (”You need a mani bad. You should find a Chinese chick to buff your situation.”). And interestingly (coincidentally?) enough, her Oscar-winning movie, Juno, just so happens to feature actress Emily Perkins, costar of the Ginger Snaps trilogy.

Originality aside (it’s also being likened to Heathers and Species), Jennifer’s Body is being celebrated as low culture, criticized for being worse than low culture and otherwise dividing the bloggers up as only Cody’s feature follow-up to Juno could. Meanwhile, the truly important people (i.e. the teen boys looking at blogs) probably won’t care about what’s a good screenplay or what films this may have ripped off, because they’re probably only paying attention to all the teased Megan Fox nudity (including plenty of footage of that “topless” scene we saw “leaked” photos of last year).

By the way, my second impression of the trailer was that it’s cool they used a Runaways song so that this Bloggery can be linked to last Friday’s posting, in a way. Shows how bored I was with the plot/dialogue/visuals. Also, because you probably won’t see her acknowledged on most posts about this movie, Jennifer’s Body is directed by Karyn Kusama, of Girlfight and Æon Flux.

Now, on to the film blog reactions, after the jump:

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• Sure, The Dark Knight is conquering the world, but Mamma Mia! has just surpassed Titanic to become the highest grossing movie of all time in the UK. Compared to the Batman flick, which has only earned $88.8 million in the UK’s territory (shared with Ireland and Malta), Mamma Mia! has made $132.2 million.
• Following their 2007 share of Michael Cera’s breakthrough, directors Jason Reitman and Greg Mottola are sharing in the rise of another young talent: Jesse Eisenberg, who stars in Mottola’s upcoming Adventureland, will next star in Reitman’s The Wedding, which sounds like The Graduate in more ways than one.
• Gore Verbinski will helm a movie about a real-life, married, role-playing 53-year-old diabetic who spends 20 hours a day online as “a musclebound entrepeneur” with a virtual wife. To acquaint yourself with the whole story, particularly why his real spouse is pissed, check out the Wall Street Journal article upon which it will be based.
• 30 Rock genius Tracy Morgan will star as an African dictator in Freshman Roommates, which asks the question what if those Nigerian prince scams weren’t scams.
• Harrison Ford is making another comedy in which he (likely) ends up with a much, much younger woman, this time played by Rachel McAdams.
• Please, please, please, Academy, nominate “Dracula’s Lament” for Best Original Song Oscar.

• Jay and Mark Duplass are abandoning the mumblecore movement for Hollywood. And not only will they work with a bigger budget, they’ve also acquired an Apatow-appropriate cast featuring John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei. The untitled comedy (formerly called Safety Man) will have us believe that Tomei actually birthed Hill and still looks as good as she does.
• Let the Mamma Mia! copycats come forward: New Line has bought the rights to the Off-Broadway musical Rock of Ages, which features a ton of 1980s rock anthems from bands like Journey, Twisted Sister, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon, Styx and Mr. Big (see the full list of musical numbers here). Despite the title, though, there’s apparently no Def Leppard. Start growing your mullet now and we’ll see you on opening night for some heavy metal sing-a-long goodness.
• While Hollywood is abuzz with news of one female director being canned from a franchise, Fox 2000 has signed on another female director to take over a franchise. Of course, it’s only Betty Thomas and the movie she’s been hired for is Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel (yes, that’s the real title), so it’s still not that exciting a step for womankind.
• Brad Pitt will star in The Lost City of Z, a true story in which he’ll play Col. Percy Fawcett, an explorer who allegedly served as the inspiration for both Indiana Jones and Kent Allard (aka The Shadow). James Gray is directing.
• We still have to wait almost a year before seeing Benicio Del Toro as The Wolfman, since Universal pushed back the horror remake from April to November. Also, Ridley Scott’s Nottingham is delayed until 2010.

• The long overdue remake of Chan Wook-park’s Oldboy (which was based on a manga) has just fallen into surprisingly heavy hands. Steven Spielberg is now involved in some capacity and Will Smith will star as the vengeful kidnap victim. Will such populist dreammakers retain all that graphic violence? Will Universal (and mainstream audiences) be okay with such a disturbing reveal at the end? Is it really necessary to remake such an internationally crossed-over title in the first place?
• Universal apparently wants to continue in the musical business following its success with Mamma Mia! However, while an adaptation of In the Heights might be great, there’s no way it’ll do even a tenth of the business that Mamma has done across the globe.
• An adaptation of the recent LA Times‘ series on the 1940s LAPD organized crime task force could be pretty cool, but Warners may want to title it something other than Gangster Squad, which sounds a little too much like Monster Squad. Mickey Cohen’s got nards!
• Obviously Madagascar 2 will be #1 this weekend, but is Variety really correct to speculate that Soul Men might only be big with African American audiences? Never mind Bernie Mac’s pre-death crossover successes. But no mention of the celebrity death cult that was constantly referenced when The Dark Knight was opening?

• Is it a sign of the end of the world, or simply an effect of the economic crisis and the presidential election? Beverly Hills Chihuahua has won the hearts of an America that apparently doesn’t want anymore serious content to think about. The talking dog movie came out on top for the second weekend in a row with $17.5 million (for a total of more than $50 mil.), easily defeating Leo, Russell and Ridley, and especially Bill Murray, whose City of Ember barely beat out the Christian hit Fireproof to make it into the top 10. An announcement about Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 is expected by the end of the week.
• At least specialty division films are doing well enough, with The Duchess expansion bringing the period piece into the top 10 and both RocknRolla and Happy-Go-Lucky debuting in limited markets with per screen averages around $20,000. Rachel Getting Married is also still seeing success with its old-fashioned slow rollout, now grossing about $17,000 on each of its 27 screens. And Religulous continues its path towards surpassing Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed as the top grossing doc of 2008.
• Ridley Scott will finally direct the epic sci-fi adaptation The Forever War, which he describes as “a bit of The Odyssey by way of Blade Runner” and which he’s been attempting to make for 25 years. Is it terribly cynical of me to think that it will be a major disappointment? Certainly the expectations are going to be extremely high since Scott’s other efforts in the genre are two of the most influential sci-fi films of all time.
• Back to signs of the end of the world: Variety posted this ludicrous sentence, which fits with audiences favoring dumb, happy fare during hard times, late last Friday: “So if Oscar voters rebel against the pervasive darkness, does this mean “Mamma Mia!” and “High School Musical 3″ could become front-runners?”

• The weekend box office went just as expected with Beverly Hills Chihuahua unfortunately coming out on top with $29 million and Rachel Getting Married earning the best per-screen average ($33,667) with an impressive $303,000 gross from only 9 locations. Also, with so many new films debuting, Flash of Genius, Blindness and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People couldn’t even open in the top ten — the latter placed as low as #19 — and An American Carol and Religilous only placed ninth and tenth, respectively. Still, for a documentary, Religilous‘ $3.5 million debut and $6,972 per-screen average are both honorable achievements. The film had the highest non-fiction debut of 2008, and it’s sure to be the highest-grossing non-concert doc of the year.
• Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist also debuted relatively well this past weekend, which made it a perfect time for Mandate Pictures to annouce that the film’s screenwriter, Lorene Scafaria, will make her directorial debut with the romantic comedy Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.
• For awhile now I’ve noticed the headlines about Mamma Mia!’s incredible overseas business, but I’ve so far ignored them. Well, here’s the latest off-balanced tally: compared to its already hit-qualifying $143 million domestic gross, the musical has taken in close to $400 million extra from international markets. That’s nearly three-fourths of its total take, for those who like fractions.
• 200 projects developed by DreamWorks while living under Paramount’s roof will be divided up rather fairly between the two studios now that they’re separating. About one-fifth of those will remain joint efforts, of which one-half will be primarily developed by DreamWorks with Paramount having an option to co-finance and co-distribute. While some of these special-circumstance projects are rumored to be Spielberg’s directing and producing gigs, there’s still no news on what’s going on with the Tintin trilogy.

• Earning $14.3 million in its third weekend, Tropic Thunder retained its top placement on the box office chart over the holiday, yet it’s total gross still hasn’t reached the movie’s reported $90 million budget. Meanwhile, five new wide releases (Babylon A.D., Traitor, Disaster Movie, College and Hamlet 2, which expanded this week) performed badly enough to place this year’s Labor Day total at 17% below last year’s. In the end, the slow four-day weekend may have contributed to Summer 2008’s inability to top the box office of Summer 2007, despite The Dark Knight’s now more than $500 mill. take.
• The most interesting box office news from the weekend is Mamma Mia!’s 34% increase over its previous weekend take — despite having lost more than 350 screens — due to Universal’s releasing a special sing-a-long version of the musical to 299 locations. I’d say something about the film being on its way to Rocky Horror-like cult hit status, but at $132.9 million and climbing, it’s already earned more than Rocky Horror has in 35 years and should anyway be considered an actual hit.
• As for limited releases, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter failed to mention that Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django earned $13,106 on a single screen in NYC this past weekend. Meanwhile, one of my favorite films of the year, Jirí Menzel’s I Served the King of England, earned a terrific per-screen average of $8,488 to gross almost $68,000.
• I’ve always thought Nastassja Kinski was one of the most boring actresses in the world, but at least she would have given Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards that usual casting from the ’70s cred. Unfortunately, Diane Kruger, who’s just plain boring, has instead been cast in the part originally offered to Kinski.

• Is Bruce Wayne, as John Carney wonders at Dealbreaker, “exactly the ‘better class of criminal’ that the Joker describes”? Spoileriffic analysis of Batman’s white-collar misdeeds follows.
• Mike Jones weighs in on the sale of indieWIRE to SnagFilms. “Despite the owners’ (which included myself, to a very small extent) desire to sell under the right terms, indieWIRE seemed destined to be independent.” Buuut…”The difficult truth about being independent is that it’s mostly for the young.”
• Glenn “Lists are Bullshit” Kenny offers 14 numbered thoughts on Mamma Mia! He begins by contemplating “the comingled semens of Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard, and Colin Firth competing in the fallopian tubes of Meryl Streep”; he ends with the admission, “I kind of want to have sex with Christine Baranski.”

• There’s apparently a new Batman movie out? And it had the best weekend opening ever? Hmmm. The things a girl misses when she goes on vacation! Meanwhile, Meryl Streep continued to prove her insane drawing power at the summer box office, as Mamma Mia! withstood the Dark Knight onslaught to scrape up a totally respectable $27.6 million.
• Cinetic Media is developing a “multimillion-dollar film-finishing fund”, with the help of an injection of cash from Aver Media.
• Time Warner Cable has struck a deal to carry Fearnet, the horror movies on-demand service of Sony Pictures TV, Lionsgate and Comcast.
• Fergie’s inexplicable career progress continues unabated.

Meryl Streep has previously sung on screen (most recently for Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion), but the upcoming Mamma Mia! is the first real musical of her 30 year career. Why all the singing and dancing, and why now? “It was to prove Pauline Kael wrong,” insists Stuart Jeffries.

In this Guardian interview, he suggests to Streep that her decision to take a lead role in this likely summer blockbuster was nothing but a long-delayed strike against the film critic who decades earlier complained that Streep acted only “from the neck up.” Amazingly, Streep essentially shrugs and says, “Yeah, maybe”––and then goes on to tie Kael’s criticism of the actresses body language to the film critic’s ethnic/economic insecurity. The actual, speculative diss after the jump.

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I don’t know if they show Broadway musical ads on television anywhere outside the New York area, but I used to hate the cheesy commercials for Mamma Mia! This coming from a guy who loves cheesy, especially when it involves ’70s music like ABBA. As much as I was turned off by those ads, though, I have to admit the new trailer for the movie adaptation is a perfect continuation of their marketing style. The quick edits that just barely show us parts of dance numbers, the overplayed acting that doesn’t seem as suitable when close up and on-screen — the only thing missing is shots of the audience dancing and clapping. And that trademark image of the mother and daughter in front of the mirror.

Of course, this means I’m turned off to the movie, too, despite my man crush on Colin Firth, who plays one of the three men who might be the father of the bride, and my interest in seeing Meryl Streep pumping her arms up and down a lot. If there’s anything more cinematic that Mamma Mia! resembles than those Broadway ads, it’s two terrible, sunshiny musicals: From Justin to Kelly and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. Nonetheless, I’m sure plenty of moms and daughters are more excited about the movie than I am, which is fine for them. I’ll stick to watching the more macho ABBA movie, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, preferably with my dad.

If you like the trailer, be sure to check it out in crisp HD over at Moviefone, and check out the photo gallery at Cinematical. Oh and check out one of the old Mamma Mia! Broadway promos here.