No Academy Awards here, but thanks largely to Jamie Lee Curtis it provides a good time.
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Somehow I missed the original 1976 version of this movie, also from Disney, starring Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster as the mom and daughter who magically switch places. Maybe I've led a deprived adulthood. Maybe the Disney appellation scared me off. Maybe anything called "Freaky Friday" sent me running in the opposite direction. In any case, now I've had the chance to see the 2003 remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, and, you know what? It's not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Kind of cute, actually.
Not that the story is all that original. After all, Mark Twain had the idea of switching places, albeit not magically, way back in "The Prince and the Pauper." Then, too, the 1976 "Freaky Friday," though based on a book and screenplay by Mary Rodgers, was really a reworking of the 1948 British movie "Vice Versa," where a father and son trade places after wishing on an enchanted stone, a movie later remade with Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage. And we saw Dudley Moore switch places with his kid in "Like Father, Like Son"; and Tom Hanks as a child in an adult body in "Big"; and male chauvinistic pigs shifted into the bodies of beautiful women in "Goodbye, Charlie" and "Switch." By now I think you get my point.
While this new "Freaky Friday" has been updated for twenty-first century sensibilities with plenty of rock music, pierced navels, punk hairdos, and the like, make no mistake: It's still a Disney picture, PG rating and all, and it's geared primarily for kids and teens. You'll find no violence, sex, nudity, or profanity here, despite their prevalence in today's society. The young people in this movie may appear rebellious, but they're basically innocent and determined to remain so.
In addition, be prepared to tolerate a lot of stereotypes before the story is over. But if you hang in long enough, the stereotypes begin to grow on you, and you accept them as basically harmless, humorous caricatures. Curtis plays a movie-typical harried mother, Dr. Tess Coleman, conservative, straight-arrow, a widowed psychologist, engaged to remarry shortly. Lohan plays Tess's movie-typical bright, teenage, airhead daughter, Anna, misunderstood, surly, style-conscious, and resentful that her mother is remarrying.
The mother's fiancée, Ryan, is a movie-typical Mr. Nice Guy, played by perpetual nice guy Mark Harmon. The mother's father, Grandpa, is a movie-typical dotty, absentminded old codger, played by Harold Gould. Tess's romantic interest, Jake, is a movie-typical Mr. Sweetheart, played by Chad Michael Murray. Anna's little brother, Harry, is a movie-typical bratty kid, played by Ryan Malgarini. And Anna's high school English teacher, Mr. Bates, is a movie-typical uptight, vindictive tyrant, played by Stephen Tobolowsky. (Thanks, Disney. The "Psycho" Bates reference was a cute touch, considering Ms. Curtis's mother's role in the Hitchcock classic, plus it makes English teachers everywhere all warm and fuzzy inside.)
What happens is that the mom and daughter are constantly at one another's throats, arguing, demanding, protesting, and generally behaving like a movie-typical mother and her fifteen-year-old daughter are supposed to behave, each thinking the other selfish and uncaring. Inevitably, they tell each other they can't possibly know how the other is feeling, and because of a magic fortune cookie they instantly change places. Tess's soul goes into Anna's body and vice versa. To say the least, neither is happy with the arrangement. "I'm old," declares Anna. "I'm like the Crypt Keeper!"
It's at this point, finally, about a half an hour into the movie that things pick up and take off. It's been a long wait, to be sure, but Jamie Lee, especially, is a delight and has never been funnier. She goes wild with her mother's credit card and has to psychoanalyze her mother's patients and go on a television show to promote her mother's new book, and it all gets pretty frenzied. Meanwhile, Anna's flame, Jake, begins to dislike the new, rigid personality she's mysteriously taken on and, in the movie's only slightly kinky scenes, starts to fall for the mother.
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[release]11532[/release]