Freaky Friday: 2003, dir. Mark S. Waters. Seen on DVD (March 6).
We saw Freaky Friday because of peer pressure. All kinds of people told my boyfriend and me how funny it was, how surprisingly entertaining, and how much we would enjoy it.
So I think we expected too much from this movie. It would have been better if we had seen it the weekend it opened, perhaps under duress, expecting something formulaic and crappy, and then we would have had a happy surprise.
As it was, we saw Freaky Friday at home on DVD when we had nothing much else to do, and it was entertaining enough, but not quite the laughfest we anticipated.
I remember seeing the original Freaky Friday as a child … after I’d read the book. Freaky Friday made me believe that the book was always better than its film adaptation. I don’t remember seeing any movies that were better than the book until high school at least, except maybe Gone with the Wind, and even that is arguable.
The book Freaky Friday has a very good premise for a movie, but the plot is uneven and there are some pretty lame moments, if I remember correctly (like the whole conversation with the police department). Also, the book focuses on the daughter in the mother’s body, and glosses over the mom in the daughter’s body as being not very interesting.
I haven’t seen the original Disney adaptation (1976) in years and years, but I remember thinking at the time that it was exactly like every other live-action Disney movie from the same time frame. Disney movies in the 1970s were very formulaic and this one was no exception. Jodie Foster was cool, because Jodie Foster is always cool, but the wacky antics of Barbara Harris were embarrassing at best. The movie was full of tired old character actors doing the same shtick we’d seen them do in a dozen other Disney films. I understood the need to liven up the plot from the novel, but there had to be a more original way.
The remake of Freaky Friday is much better than the 1976 version, but like its predecessor, it follows the standard formula of contemporary Disney comedies. Hey, look, it’s a teenager who’s in a band! And no one understands her! It’s a single mom trying to balance Family and Career, and of course this means she’s neglecting her family! And no one understands her either! And so on. The storyline provides no real surprises. Stereotyping abounds, most annoyingly in the whole “Asian women with mysterious secrets and powers” thing that I’m surprised did not meet with complaints.
Like the other surprise Disney smash hit of 2003 (Pirates of the Caribbean), Freaky Friday is saved from mediocrity by one superior, amazing, tour-de-force actor, in this case Jamie Lee Curtis. She makes this movie worthwhile. The other actors are all fine, and it is in fact a pleasure to see that Harold Gould is still alive and well and working, but none of it would work without Jamie Lee Curtis. She holds nothing back. You actually believe that there’s a teenage girl trapped in her body. It’s amazing and hilarious.
I suspect that Jamie Lee Curtis is the reason why so many people told us that we really ought to see Freaky Friday because it was so funny. Otherwise, this movie might have gone directly to the Disney Channel.
Interesting side note: Freaky Friday‘s director, Mark S. Waters, is the brother of Daniel Waters, who wrote the screenplay for Heathers. Perhaps this movie would have been improved if he’d engaged his brother to adapt it, instead of Leslie Dixon. (I remember rather liking Dixon in college until she started doing some very disappointing work, most notably Mrs. Doubtfire. This movie suffers from some of the same pitfalls of predictability as that one did.)
So if they make a movie with both Jamie Lee Curtis and Johnny Depp it won’t even matter what it’s about?? Someone should just put these two ‘tour-de-force’ actors together and we can enjoy the results.
(IMDb says their only joint venture was the recent Oscar ceremony.)
I actually want to see Freaky Friday because of Lindsey Lohan, who single-handedly made the remake of The Parent Trap about ten thousand times better than the original. (It helps to not be Hayley Mills, but that’s not enough credit – Lohan carried that movie.)
But I hear Curtis is good too. Rental soon, I think.
I’ve been maintaining since I first saw the film on the big screen that there are two — and only two — reasons to see it: the performances of Curtis and Lohan. (And I’d rank Lohan’s just ahead of Curtis’s.) The plot and the rest of the characterization are reasonably pathetic, and I was annoyed by the Inscrutable Asian stuff, but it’s well worth the rental just to watch those two playing each other’s characters. In fact, I recently watched it again on DVD with my brother and liked it more than I had the first time, simply because I was able to ignore the rest of the film and just concentrate on enjoying those two performances.