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Who’s
who? (l-r) Curtis and Lohan in Freaky Friday.
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I
Am My Mother
By Laura Leon
Freaky
Friday
Directed
by Mark Waters
What at first seems like yet another ridiculous remake of
a pretty crappy original—the 1976 Freaky Friday starring
Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris—turns out to be a pretty delightful
movie. I was 11 when I first saw the original, and I remember
thinking that it just plain looked drab and cheap, especially
when the permed and frosted Harris “surfed” in what was so
obviously a soundstage setting. The 2003 version, however,
is fresh and snappy, thanks to an efficient script by Heather
Hach and Leslie Dixon, a marked improvement in every possible
way.
In a nutshell, a spell is cast on bickering mother Tess (Jamie
Lee Curtis) and teen daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan), which
holds them hostage in each other’s bodies until they learn
about selfless love. They spend an entire day trapped as each
other, and trying hard to keep anyone from noticing while
they figure out a way to break the spell.
Freaky
Friday plays on the ultimately heartwarming idea that
you don’t really know somebody until you’ve walked a mile
in his or her shoes. It’s a given that, over the course of
this particular Friday, Tess and Anna will learn to appreciate
each other and get over this nasty animosity that seemingly
has existed since Dad died three years earlier. Anna greets
every irritation from brother Harry (Ryan Malgarini) with
a scream, and accuses Tess of taking his side in all disputes.
She’s a lovely, wild child who dresses punk, plays in a rock
band, and struggles with a dastardly teacher who makes her
life more of a hell than Tess does. Oh, and she’s got the
hots for Jake (Chad Michael Murray), a slack-jawed guy with
a motorcycle. Mom would so not approve.
Tess, for her part, seems markedly efficient, juggling the
kids, the home and a flourishing career as a psychologist
and author. So what if she heeds the constant call of a half-dozen
Palm Pilots and cell phones? She’s on the eve of her nuptials
to kind, understanding Ryan (Mark Harmon), when disaster—in
the form of a fortune cookie bearing that wacky spell—strikes.
The movie would be nothing without the excellent performances
of Curtis and Lohan. Curtis is hysterically funny exuding
teenage energy and spouting sarcastic sayings a la MTV’s The
Real World. All this, of course, while trapped in her
still-sexy, yet decidedly middle-aged body; upon realizing
what has happened, Anna wails in the mirror “I’m Ohhllllldd”
and declares herself the crypt-keeper. Curtis has always had
a knack for comedy, and this little movie allows her trade
on that ability rather than sell her oomph.
Even at her most aggravating, Lohan is endearing, able to
key in the viewer to the fact that while Anna might be different,
she’s a good kid. But as Tess, Lohan does great work, mostly
via small visual cues and gestures that are a marked contrast
to her performance as Anna. For instance, when talking to
Anna’s friends about Jake, Anna/Tess nonchalantly pulls down
her pal’s midriff-baring top to conceal her belly. This is
done so much like a mom would adjust her child’s clothing,
unconscious and deliberate at the same time, that I wonder
whether Lohan thought it up herself or was directed thus.
The movie’s weak link is Jake, but then again, he’s really
just a concept, someone that Anna can find cool and sexy,
and that Tess can judge as not good enough. Jake cools on
Anna when she’s Tess, but completely digs Tess when she’s
Anna, which results in some very funny Mrs. Robinson-type
subtext. But he’s simple enough to fall back in love with
Anna when he thinks she’s playing a kickass guitar solo. Go
figure. Freaky Friday isn’t about reality and it isn’t
about complexity. But it is a very enjoyable, laugh-filled
farce, perfect for late-summer viewing—and for forgetting
that awful original.
Not-So-Special
Forces
S.W.A.T.
Directed
by Clark Jackson
S.W.A.T.
is based on the 1975-76 TV show, a good-guys-bad-guys relic
of the pre-Hill Street Blues era of police- procedural
realism. And that’s what this workmanlike remake is banking
on: nostalgia for a time when law enforcement was all good,
a force for social rehabilitation inspiring ever-greater heights
of crime-fighting efficiency. Helmed by Clark Jackson, an
actor in, and director of, many a cop show, S.W.A.T.
takes on almost the entirety of Los Angeles’ criminal element
and barely breaks a sweat. And it barely races a pulse, either.
Instead of taking a cue from recent events in New York City
and Baghdad and mining the rapidly blurring line between police
and military enforcement, Jackson opts for escapist fakery
that lacks even the retro-cool squareness of the new Dragnet.
What the big-screen S.W.A.T. does have is a true-blue
confidence in its Special Weapons and Tactics, as well as
complete confidence in the ballistic charisma of its stars,
Colin Farrell and Samuel L. Jackson. Farrell is in the Robert
Urich role as Jim Street, an absurdly talented but respectful
young Swatter who is demoted to the “bat cage” after his disorderly
partner (Jeremy Renner) wings a hostage during the opening
crisis. This melee of paramilitary bank robbers, LAPD choppers,
media ambulance chasers, and high-tech gizmos sets up the
plot with one sentence: “We’re sending in a special unit.”
The new special unit is put together by Sgt. “Hondo” (Jackson),
a representative of “old-school S.W.A.T. ass-kicking.” Hondo
enlists the disgraced Street, plus some other really cool
guys, including LL Cool J as a tough beat cop and Michelle
Rodriguez as an even tougher traffic cop. Our hero Street,
a former S.E.A.L. who has all the answers and who can see
trip wires even in the murk of a sewer tunnel, is played by
Farrell as a milder version of his absurdly talented agent
in The Recruit—which works well enough, since the training
sequences of the two movies are interchangeable.
The unit’s make-or-break assignment comes when a slippery
international arms dealer (French heartthrob Olivier Martinez)
uses his live-news airtime to offer $100 million to anyone
who can spring him from jail, inspiring every criminal, gangbanger
and wacko in Los Angeles with an escape plan. He is then transferred
out of lock-up without extra security precautions. Many direct-to-video-game
chases ensue, featuring a stream of pop-up perps and a so-so
jetjacking.
The film’s cheery veneer of TV-style cheesiness—complete with
a medley of scenes from the characters’ off-duty lives—wears
thin quickly, especially the canned anti-authority swagger
of Jackson’s Hondo. And the film’s strenuously multiculti
attitude is as fake as Farrell’s SoCal accent: The “Frenchie”
villain is cheekily referred to as “the frog” (if the bad
guy were Asian or Hispanic, would the use of “chink” or “spic”
be given quite the same prominence?), yet Rodriguez—no slouch
in the charisma department herself—is relegated to single-mom
window dressing. As for any romance between her Hispanic cop
and the S.E.A.L. hero, it might as well be 1975 all over again.
—Ann
Morrow
Boy
Meets Girl, Blah Blah Blah
Jet
Lag
Directed
by Danièle Thompson
At least the filmmakers are up-front about their intentions.
Jet Lag begins with a black screen, and a voice-over
by Rose (Juliette Binoche) in which she wishes that for just
one day life could be like a Hollywood movie. Rose wants a
happy ending, and it’s obvious that director Danièle Thompson
(who also cowrote the screenplay) is damn well going to give
her one.
The story begins with Rose at an airport in Paris, fleeing
a brutish boyfriend. There’s a hitch, though, as France’s
entire public sector is on strike and the planes aren’t flying.
(This seems to be a political dig at unions, but the nuances
are lost in translation.) Lucky for her, she loses her cell
phone down a toilet. She then must borrow a cell phone from
Felix (Jean Reno), who, because he is played by the only other
movie star in the cast, will become the means to her desired
Hollywood happy ending.
Felix, a chef turned entrepreneur, is plagued by dizzy spells
and heart palpitations, which, we are helpfully informed (in
flashback), are strictly mental in origin. Rose (the daughter
of communists, and named after Rosa Luxemburg) is a beautician
with an addiction to too much rouge. They are both recovering
from failed relationships. They both have amusing quirks:
She cries watching political documentaries, and he’s obsessive
about food (“The pig died for nothing—this ham is terrible.”)
The pleasure is mostly in the acting, however. Reno, adorned
with a rakish hair appliance, is gruff neurosis personified,
while Binoche, cast as the opposite of the nurturing types
she usually plays, suffers with great enthusiasm. Their characters
are both resigned to shallowness and misery: A professional
chef can’t be proud of his line of faux-fancy frozen foods,
and Rose can’t really be happy with an abusive boyfriend.
(The possibility that Rose may be troweling the makeup on
out of habit, to cover up bruises—which at least would have
been a reasonable explanation—is completely missed by the
filmmaker.)
To sum up, they rush around the airport for 30 minutes, insult
each other at the hotel for 30 minutes, reveal deep personal
secrets for 30 minutes and then, l’amour. Nothing new,
but thoroughly pleasant.
—Shawn
Stone
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