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Good golly, it’s been a while.

My wonderful girlfriend and I are attending the current Eye-Opener series at The Brattle. We’ve been to 2 screenings so far.

I appreciate Voy a explotar (I’m Going to Explode) a little more after thinking about it post-screening, which is not to say I enjoyed it, or that I thought it was particularly good. Its basic trick is to take a Bonnie & Clyde-style couple on a crime spree story, and scale it to the dimensions of lifelike adolescent angst — instead of say, robbing a bank, Román and Maru purloin food from Maru’s family’s apartment; their hideout is their own roof. Instead of Hollywood-style slick editing and sophisticated post-production, writer/director Gerardo Naranjo renders his story with a naturalism that approaches Dogme 95 standards (sometimes so much so that it’s a little hard to follow the murkier sequences). Unfortunately, though, Naranjo honors the structural conventions of the crime-spree flick, so the audience knows more-or-less what’s coming (if not exactly how it comes about). The unsatisfying conclusion took me so far out of the film that I was distracted by odd choices in subtitling. On the other hand, somewhere in the middle I was emotionally involved enough to be annoyed by the choices made by the character Román as much as by the screenwriter, so there is that.

I thought Good Hair was terrific. It’s exactly what I hope for in a preview film series: something I might not have sought out on my own, and that expands my world a little bit. It’s a documentary about the meaning and means of “Good Hair.” The film was sparked, narrator Chris Rock says, by his daughter asking him why she doesn’t have good hair. The question is deceptively simple, but answering it takes a whole movie. In the black community, it turns out, “good hair,” is very high-maintenance, usually straightened, to make it more like white hair. (Several interviewees independently assert that relaxing their hair makes white people more relaxed and enables them to get better jobs.) The film is roughly divided into two acts, one about hair relaxer and one about hair weaves; interleaved throughout is coverage of an Atlanta stylists competition. The interviewees range from Maya Angelou to reality show stars, with plenty of man- and woman-on-the street footage as well. It’s entertaining to watch (often laugh out loud funny) and thought-provoking during and after the film — because when you really think about it, a lot of what goes into “good hair” is pretty horrific.

Speaking of my wonderful girlfriend, The Brattle, and horrific, when my wonderful girlfriend is out of town I often take in a horror movie or two, because I like them better than she does. Usually I’m disappointed. This time I picked Jennifer’s Body, entirely because The Brattle had recently recommended a roll-your-own double feature: they suggested seeing Jennifer’s Body in a first-run theatre, then their screening of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell. It stuck in my head because a) I love the Hole song “Violet,” (the one with “Jennifer’s body” in a refrain), and b) I’d seen a preview for Jennifer’s Body and that made it look completely generic. So why was The Brattle recommending it, and, if memory serves, either actually using the word “feminist,” or at least phrases that left that impression, like “smart, tough women”? I didn’t even realize until the credits rolled that the Diablo Cody was the screenwriter. I would have put that upfront in the voiceover: “an intelligent, funny horror movie from the writer of Juno.”

Anyway, Jennifer’s Body is pretty awesome. It evoked Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Heathers, and Ginger Snaps, and something gleefully trashy, like one of those WB teen soaps (with f-bombs) but established its own identity. It’s a metatextual movie — it probably helps to have seen some dreadful cookie-cutter horror flicks to understand how Jennifer’s Body inverts the sexist genre conventions. Where girls in 80’s slasher flicks were punished for their sexuality, Jennifer and her BFF Needy are rewarded for it (although not necessarily for every choice in how to explore it). Ultimately Jennifer’s Body ends on a “fish needs a bicycle”ish note. (Lest you think it’s all highbrow, there’s also plenty of footage of Megan Fox acting slutty and talking sluttier.) The two other people in the theatre hated it — in the lobby they were talking about almost walking out. I think I am pretty much going to love any movie in which the real villains are a color-by-numbers Autotuned emo band who think a pact with Satan is the best route to chart success (”Do you know how hard it is to make it as an indie band these days? There are so many of us, and we’re all so cute and it’s like if you don’t get on Letterman or some retarded soundtrack, you’re screwed, okay?” is how singer Nicolai defends himself, and when one of his sidemen threatens to get cold feet he asks if want to be a nobody, “or rich and famous . . . like the dude from Maroon 5.”)

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