Thirteenth in a series: Post-9/11
Blues, Internet-infected Brave New World: A
revisiting of 2001-10 pop (and political) culture
Subsections below:
A happenstance
introduction
A start of the major
phase of Lohan’s career
An impressionistic
measure: old times, versus…
Looking at things
more fine-grained, including postulated music
The lead actresses redeem
the show
Side characters
happen to be a range of less-than-superhero males
A dose of Disney
racism
You ask, “What is he up to now? Why this film?”
I had wanted to do a Lindsay Lohan film for some time, though the reason (mainly giving credit to someone who’s
sadly become a punchline for some years) may seem quite frivolous. But then,
people might get tired of my “heavy weather” blog entries: “Not another chunky
brief about some political morass or personal ‘Russian-prison-literature’ story!
Why can’t we have Pop Rocks? Simple pleasures?”
Of course, for those in the U.S. who view the country, as it
is seemingly changing, through Donald Trumpian eyes, and lament how “Every day,
you seem to find someone else ‘has joined the other team,’ and you don’t know
which team they’re on, and you [who aren’t on that same team] don’t know which
bathroom you should go to anymore,” a story about old-fashioned family tensions,
kids’ dreams, a fantasy story-twist, and a heartwarming ending may be just the
ticket. (This while some country songwriter may release a single titled “Should
I Hold On Till I Get Home?”)
This film, indeed,
seems to speak of “another, simpler time,” which might seem all the starker
today, with pictures of bloody kids in Syria and reports of a haystack-haired
character, running for high-level U.S. office, whose duck lips are again
flapping like a tattered flag in a stiff wind. Freaky Friday was a kids’ novel by Mary Rodgers published in the
early 1970s, before libraries and booksellers carved out a huge category—with
candy-colored covers and library-cataloguing “YA” markers on book spines—of
young adult, fantasy, and sci-fi works that seem as big among youth today as
record albums were for teens in the 1970s. Freaky
was first made into a film in 1977 (a glimpse of it on the 2003-film DVD
suggests it was pretty cheaply made), with Barbara Harris as the mother and
Jodie Foster, still a kid, as the daughter.
I think a way to look at the 2003 version, as it is regarded
today, is like Tin Pan Alley–inspired rock music of the 1960s (think Paul
McCartney in his more old-timey in the 1960s, or Tiny Tim in parts of his album
of ~1968, God Bless Tiny Tim)—and
let’s try to make the analogy digestible:
* The McCartney music was a “set of retro clothes” (derived
from 1920s-30s styles) to put on in the 1960s…
* (this corresponds to how, in 2003, Freaky, of 1970s vintage, seemed when remade in 2003)
* and still later, in the 1970s (or later), the
retro-in-’60s music was embraced, in however sympathetic a way (despite its
being “retro”), by young rock fans like me (even if the McCartney vaudeville
stuff could seem a bit embarrassing at times)…
* (this would correspond to how Freaky, out in 2003, seems to be enshrined today).
A happenstance
introduction
In 2003 Freaky Friday
came out in remade form, this time with Jamie Lee Curtis as the mother and Lindsay Lohan as the daughter. At the time I was going to
movies in theaters quite a lot—I did that habitually from 1999 to about 2006,
when I had more disposable income in my pocket—and I was familiar with Lindsay
Lohan only in a cursory way, as having been in something called The Parent Trap (1998), also a Disney
remake as is the 2003 film under review. Freaky
Friday was released in what is usually the summer “fallow” release period
for films, August. Still, it ended up a huge hit.
I saw it early in the month (August 2003), I believe, and I
definitely saw it again that year, in very-late August just before Labor Day,
in a situation that helps anchor my “nest of reasons” for focusing on this
film: I was in the midst of helping pseudonymous Betty, the woman who is the
elder-female focus of my memoir A College
Try that Courted Trouble, and Betty would have (with the essential aid of
an attorney who specialized in such cases) a restraining-order hearing against
her husband of eight months, in September 2003, in which hearing I served as
one of two witnesses. This enormously complicated hearing—three hours long, and
built up to over weeks in September (amid several postponements)—would be a
major factual anchor for A College Try.
But also, my dealings with Betty were such that more than
one fairly conventional support-group exponent (or frequent attendee) with whom
I had friendly dealings would suggest or imply that I was taking a chance (or
wasting energy) in dealing with Betty as I was (the full memoir explains how
this was a truly nuanced, believable situation). But in my pragmatic (and
patient) mode with Betty, I felt there was little other choice, or I made what
decent choices I felt were mine to make (especially with what came out in the
restraining-order hearing, multiple times she had gotten the police involved
with her partner-then-husband). In late August 2003, it was a simple walkabout
matter of consequence of this many-months situation that I happened to be with
her; now we were somewhat desultorily hanging around in the Ledgewood Mall area
in Morris County, N.J., when to kill time (I would have to go back to records
to explain precisely how this developed), we went into a cool movie theater on
the hot day and watched Freaky Friday.
(Incidentally, as precipitously or graspingly as other minor
entanglements were invoked in that restraining order hearing [not least concerning
a few of Betty’s female friends of the time], this movie-watching episode was
not touched on at all, because Betty’s husband didn’t know about it. By the
way, one of the big issues Betty’s husband made just before the September 2003
restraining order period was that, as he alleged, she had had an affair with
her ex-husband [first husband] when they took their [Betty’s and her first
husband’s] son to college around Labor Day. Yes, things in her life got that
crazy, and then some.)
This second watching of Freaky
in 2003 I might not have done if not with Betty and wondering which film to
see. It seemed appropriately light to help Betty take her mind off some grim
stuff she was engrossed in at the moment.
Betty thought Lindsay Lohan’s character Anna was as she,
Betty, had been as a teen. (A little wild or mouthy, was the implication, I
guess.)
A start of the major
phase of Lohan’s career
Meanwhile, my viewing of this film twice in 2003, and maybe
not only this, left me with the impression that Lohan was a rising star, and
indeed she would end up as probably the most talked-about film actress of her
generation for about four years from 2003 to 2007. In fact, Freaky Friday was something of a film
comeback for Lohan—who was about 16 when she made it—after her last “hit” in The Parent Trap, and Freaky seemed to get her the notice that
led to a string of films marketed as including her starring in them for the
next four-or-so years. (She had started as a model at age three—obviously begun
in this career by coddling parents—and had been in one or more TV productions
as a kid.)
Perhaps the film most cited in a thumbnail sketch of her
career has been Mean Girls (2004),
where she plays the “good girl” who ingenuously works herself into the clique
of mean princesses who “lord it over” others in their high school, something of
a repeat of part of the Heathers
(1989) story scheme. Mean Girls was
written by Tina Fey, another rising star in films (as a screenwriter) at the
time.
Lohan would appear in such Disney fare as a follow-up to the
old Herbie the Love Bug films (she would have been born many years after the
last of these had been in the theater). That film-theme was so old that I had a
toy Herbie in about 1970, and had long lost it (or disposed of it) by the time
I was in high school in the late 1970s. Lohan would also appear in adult things
like A Prairie Home Companion (2006),
the last film made by Robert Altman, which adapted the Garrison Keillor radio
show.
Then by early 2007 Lohan started to make lurid unfavorable
headlines with her drug problems, and her film career got to the point that, in
about mid-2007, Jack Nicholson and other actors set up a sort of boycott where
they refused to be in a film deal with Lohan, because she was so unreliable
about turning up on the set on time. Since about 2007, Lohan has not really
been the golden star she was for the years just before, though she occasionally
turns up in things, like the shlock parody Machete
(2010) and something rather odd directed by Paul Schrader in about 2013. She
even appeared as a guest actress on TV’s 2
Broke Girls in 2014 or 2015, with her husky voice and playing a fairly
forgettable character as a bride-to-be who couldn’t make up her mind about what
she wanted for her wedding from the confectionery run by the characters played
by Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs.
My point isn’t to belabor Lohan’s declined career, but to
note she was a profitable proposition for a few years during the Bush II
Administration. Freaky Friday was her
first major hit as a teen-heading-to-twenty star. And that film itself was an
old-fashioned Disney fantasy of sorts, though it seems today securely enshrined
(perhaps as a precious artifact, for some) in the canon of the fantasy/sci-fi constituency.
An impressionistic
measure: old times, versus…
Seeing Freaky
today reminds me of “old times”—for one thing, 2003 and associating with Betty,
and when films somehow had more of an innocence-and-pluck about them than they
do today. Also, Freaky struck me when
I first saw it (e.g., in how shots were composed) as made rather off-hand, and yet
effective in its comedy. Today, I’m struck by its adept way of being put
together, even if it seems a little cheaply made by, say, huge-Disney-hit
standards. The producer was Andrew Gunn, and the director Mark Waters.
As written for 2003 (by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon), it
has a lot of corny premises and jokes (and occasional physical slapstick, and
canned lines like the resolving “Let’s do
this!”), but it usually works well enough as basic entertainment, and works
especially well in the performances of Curtis and Lohan as the mother and
daughter who, due to a kind of magic wrought by a Chinese restaurateur,
supernaturally exchange places—their minds/“souls” end up in each other’s
bodies—and they thus have an opportunity to “see what it’s like being in the
other’s shoes” until such time as they learn a life-affirming lesson, and their
minds then supernaturally go back to their original bodies.
This may sound like cornball stuff, but it’s a fun romp for
a summer period that might otherwise seem a seasonal limbo before (say, if we look
at just 2016) Labor Day comes and (groan) the presidential race gets into high
gear. And, as I said, Curtis’ and Lohan’s performances are quite good. Lohan is
especially good, with her aping of a “middle-aged mom’s” gestures and vocal
tones. She shows why she seemed quite the promising young talent for some
years.
Looking at things
more fine-grained, including postulated music
I enjoyed re-watching this film the first time this month
(August 2016), even if the worn DVD had skips toward the end, starting when
there is rapprochement between mother and daughter and the spell is removed. I
remembered enough of the film from 2003 that these skips didn’t matter much in
following the story (especially when it was at its more banal/mawkish), though
that kind of skipping usually disturbs me a lot when I watch DVDs.
Watching this film a second time this month, and parts a
third-or-so time, left me feeling this was a better film for 16-year-olds up to
about college age maybe, than for old codgers like me who (among many other,
more warmhearted pursuits) enjoy throwing verbal darts at fish-in-a-barrel
Donald Trump. Those whose lives are close to a “peak experience” with Bubble
Yum, Pop Rocks, and that kind of sneakers that are augmented with flickering
lights (OK, maybe I’m sketching/imputing an age-group too young for this film),
and gossip during lunchtime at school, may feel this film stands up well on
multiple viewings. But for me it is a lot of fun the first time, and looks
quite shallow a second time. Maybe that’s a function partially of my current
income-related doldrums.
Anna Coleman, played by Lohan, is a girl of about 16,
“stressing out” over schoolwork and boys; she’s one of those concoctions of
movies of this type, a mid-teens girl going through a rebellious phase; with
blond streaks in her red hair, Lohan looks a bit like the smart girl indulging
in some rebellious “cross-currents.” And she is a bandmate (in a rock band
called Pink Slip) with two other peer-age girls, played by Christina Vidal [URL
1; see URL list at end of entry] and Haley Hudson [URL 2], both of whom have a
“garage rock-group” look, Vidal with rainbow-colored streaks in her frizzy hair,
and Hudson with a sort of goth/Tim Burton–esque look, pale face and dark shock
of chopped-off straight, black hair. (By the way, marketing mavens: note the
trio of type of hero-sylphs: bonhomie-rich girl “of color,” “white girl with
black hair,” and “white girl with red hair (with blond streaks),” the latter a
substitute for a purely blond girl.)
The music they play, which is first sampled in the Colemans’
garage, is a sort of semi-punk hard rock, which when featuring the female
voices sounds a lot like Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. (There are also two
male players, who comprise the rhythm section—drums and bass. They actually
look like they’d appear in such a band—at least, a generic high school rock group.)
The song they rehearse, which later is a “familiarized” basis for the film’s edge-of-our-seats
performing climax, is something apparently titled “On and On and On,” with the
ponderous, somewhat pompous manner of classic semi-metal hard rock, here made
rather “generic” so it wouldn’t be a ripoff of any real song (I presume), but
with enough hooks to keep us interested. (I don’t think I’m alone is saying
this song is more interesting than the actual, earnest single Lohan lead-sings
at the end of the film, which strikes me as more forgettable today than it must
have in 2003.)
Anna, as the putative star bandmate, is one of the
guitarists (in the band, Vidal seems to alternate between being a lead singer
and singer/guitarist; Hudson also plays a guitarist [legs widely splayed like a
seasoned “ax-man’s”] and sings backup; all three girls have guitars when they appear
in the perform-to-playback video segment at film’s end, the type of thing that
would get some more jaded audience members getting up to leave, not wanting to
stay for this, as they’d call it,
self-indulgent marketing move centering on Lohan, who was nurturing a career as
a recording artist anyway).
Within the film’s story, Anna is supposedly the one who
delivers the steaming guitar solo (one of the film’s few close-to-mock-worthy
lines is, from Hudson’s character to Anna [in a moment before they are close to
even being on stage], “You rock harder than anyone I know!”—and if you can
embrace a film that has values like that—we all, for this film, can momentarily
self-lobotomize if we enjoyed rock growing up—then you won’t squirm watching
this film [another line is Hudson’s character’s assurance to Anna, when her mom
is (unknown to Hudson) in Anna’s body, “We’ll still love you even if it [the
guitar break] blows!”]).
The big climax of the film, in terms of Anna’s more
idealistic “career aims,” is when, with her body still inhabiting her mom’s
spirit/mind, she is awkwardly on stage as the band is supposed to do well in
this contest-type show to qualify for [whatever], and how is she going to
“deliver the rock ’n’ roll,” as the estimable Keith Richards would say (there
is even a Richards-related joke, of a less-respectful type, shortly before this
point), when it is Anna’s noodgy mom in her body?
But saints be praised, Anna, in her mom’s body, is off to
the side behind the curtains on the stage, playing a guitar that is plugged in
to an amplifier, and steaming guitar break (not one to embarrass her bandmates)
is heartily delivered at the right time—with stage-located Anna’s body/mom’s
mind, helpfully coordinating, amateurishly aping playing the guitar. The ruse
isn’t detected; the crowd, roused (and maybe pretty soused), cheers to the
heroics of the climactic guitar break. All is well, for the moment.
If you allow this kind of climax-of-sorts, this film is a
good summer Saturday treat.
The lead actresses redeem
the show
As I’ve suggested, when Curtis as “mom’s body with Anna
inside” and Lohan as “Anna’s body with mom inside” are front and center doing
their thing, they are far and away the most entertaining parts of this film.
There’s something about an actor “in a role playing someone other than his/her
normal character”—a sort of “meta” acting stunt—that can be very entertaining
when done well.
Lohan with her cherub-like face—she seems to straddle being
a girl and young adult in appearance here (looking here more girlish to me
today than she did in 2003)—is remarkable for emoting (when she is Anna) in a
teen’s hair-trigger moment-by-moment way, and (when she’s mom Tess) aping a “humorlessly
prim mother,” showing what a talent Lohan impressed people as in those days.
She would only improve on this status in films released in the next few years
(she would also be a rare actress of her generation who seemed to convey
arresting charisma in both performances and in still photos). (I didn’t care
for her appearing in her music-video bit at the end of Freaky; I couldn’t, in general, understand why promising actresses
had to show they could sing, too. This wasn’t necessary for me. Less
objectionably, Evan Rachel Wood did singing in Across the Universe [2007], when she sung one or two Beatles
songs—the film was essentially a celebration of that group’s work. [I actually
liked that film, and I’m a pretty particular Beatles fan.])
Lohan’s acting chops can be seen—in addition to Anna’s more
standard, heated head-butting moments with Curtis as her mom—when the family is
at the Chinese restaurant, seated around the table, and Anna is being “surly,”
or whatever her mother assesses her as. There are further exchanges, leading to
when Anna gets into a surprising conciliatory mode that her mother interprets,
rightly, as representing that Anna foxily has a sort of big favor to ask. But
amid this, notice how, at one or more points, Lohan has a sort of
mixed-emotions look about her, which seems so right to the moment: her eyes, as
she reads the menu and is semi-stewing amid the exchanges, seem
angry-and-ironic, yet there is also a sort of bemusement about her face. She isn’t
just being an impossible brat; there is something more resourceful and
emotionally humored about her. You wonder how much of this was a function of (for
Lohan the actress) multiple takes and the director guiding her, or how much a
function of short sleep, or whatever. But it helps show how Lohan can be a
vivid presence in articulating emotions for a part. We see it in other of her
better films, too.
Curtis here, with short hair, has that sort of vaguely
“butch” look that she has often had in recent years (you kind of mischievously
think of a sort of party game: get a photo of Curtis of recent years, with her
close-cropped hair, and put it side by side with a photo of her father Tony
Curtis from Some Like It Hot
[1959]—and will you start having a gender-bending-related freakout?). She seems
to be having fun “being Anna in her mother’s body” in this film, including
getting mischievous digs in at Anna’s younger brother Harry, played by Ryan
Malgarini [URL 3].
By the way, Curtis’ Tess is a psychologist by profession,
going about her life with a personal digital assistant (those have gone by the
board, with the advent of smartphones, haven’t they?), and other ways she is
plugged in to the modern day’s frenetic, tech-enabled go-go life. She has,
among others less pathetic, a needy client in Evan, who is a classic
midbrow-stereotype basket case of a psych client, good for cheap movie laughs
and little more.
One could also comment in this connection on the wider
relevance, or the conceptual way that a wider discussion can be worked up, in
the Tess/Anna relationship, which seems inherently “built for conflict”—such as
the mother, a psychologist no less, who presumably has a fairly rigid,
conventionalized way of assessing human behavior, and the semi-rebellious mid-teens
daughter who is “breaking bounds” as a matter of growing up. The mother, not
just by virtue of her professional training, is defined by a conceptual schema
in her way of understanding the child in a way that inherently leads to clashes
with how her child wants to be understood and accepted. (This is assuming the
mother isn’t, herself, starkly dysfunctional.) This all could lead to a
discussion of the daughter as a possible case of borderline personality
disorder (with the mother possibly mildly narcissistic), but this film seems
enough aimed to keeping things on a harmless-fun level that I won’t go further
along these lines here.
Side characters
happen to be a range of less-than-superhero males
Other characters are Ryan, Tess’s fiancé (her first husband
died, making this film a blessedly unusual one where the “broken home” is due
to the death of a parent, not a divorce—the sort of thing that would have been
an oasis of “rare forgiving culture” in the wider pop culture of the 1970s and
1980s when I [and maybe you] could have used a little more understanding of
growing up without a father). Ryan is played by Mark Harmon [URL 4], at the
time an actor whom I remembered as a sort of stolid Disney all-American “boy
next-door,” somewhat on a par with Ken Berry (remember him?). Harmon, who looks
here a bit like Tom Cruise’s older brother, has of course appeared in CBS’s NCIS TV show since 2003—which show I
have never seen, but seen advertised on TV many times.
Grandpa—he of the bad hearing, and limited eyesight (and
hence good for a range of jokes tied to those disabilities)—is played by Harold
Gould [URL 5].
Harry (Malgarini) is the classic moppet, a small, cute-faced
kid who is precocious with some of his reactions, remarks, etc., even when some
of his values are of the ilk of uninhibitedly eating some sweet out of a
container with friends before dinner.
There is also a noodgy English teacher who “has it in” for
Anna, apparently because he resented a long-ago snub from Tess when he and Tess
were classmates. This teacher, Mr. Bates, is played by Stephen Tobolowsky [URL
6].
Not least among the side characters is Jake (Chad Michael
Murray [URL 7]), the boy (older and with two non-school jobs) who has an eye
for Anna (as she does him), who gets swept up in supernaturally-induced plot
complications when he falls for the spirited spice of who he thinks is Anna’s
mother, when the mom’s body has Anna inside it. Meanwhile, Anna’s body with the
mother’s frosty personality turns him off. There is thus a sort of “mistaken-identity/romantic-attraction”
subplot that reminds me vaguely of something in the more risque Victor/Victoria (1982), directed by
Blake Edwards.
A dose of Disney
racism
Perhaps one of the more objectionable-type characters are
the two Chinese restaurant workers, the older of whom (the mom) casts the spell
over Tess and Anna, with the aid of little more than fortune cookies and some
incantation in untranslated Chinese (hmm, amazing how resourceful the Chinese
are—from massively building a state under Mao to manning factories like
Dickensian workers in more recent years, and then this casting-a-spell stuff…).
(The spell could be removed in line with the fortune cookie inscription—and you
thought these were just churned-out pop-psych slag—with the message including
“then selfless love will change you back.”)
(Seriously, I am charmed by Chinese restaurants, or at least
I used to go to them a lot more than in very recent years. My favorite, which I
still go to when I can, is a place called Peking House on Route 23 in Butler,
N.J., which I think has been there since 1980, though I only started going to
it in 2003. The female among the couple who owns it, Vivien [sp?] as she is
known, is very friendly to me and my mother [when my mother accompanies me
there], though I’m sure Vivien fully performs as the friendly small-business
owner to the tons of more-local people who patronize that restaurant. The
Chinese “ethos” of, in a service-industry capacity, being obsequious and
“wanting to serve”—which some of Vivien’s underworkers have done more than she
has—can strike me as embarrassing, as I wasn’t brought up to be “waited on” in
an old-time, servants-to-rich-folk way. But Vivien, when schmoozing with
customers, also has a familiar [if broken-English] service-industry manner that
is echoed in the daughter in this Freaky
film in no miniscule way. So the depictions of restaurateurs here aren’t
entirely “fantastic.” But I think there is enough of a stereotypic quality here
that I offer my qualms.)
The daughter is played by Rosalind Chao [URL 8], and the
mother by Lucille Soong [URL 9]. In case you thought these characters amounted
to Disney taking a “rare misstep” in terms of “political correctness,”
actually, Disney racism, if you want to routinely call it that, has been part
of its game for many decades. Since the company always aimed at “middle middle
class,” you could say, ethnic stereotypes—with no malice intended—were always a
marketing staple.
As long ago as Fantasia
(1940), I think it was, there was a segment
of two mushrooms looking like stereotyped robed Chinese doing a dance, or such.
The film Song of the South (1946), based on Uncle Remus’ stories, featuring the song “Zippetty Doo-Dah”
(which should be quite familiar to many), was derived from a sort of
“trustworthy property” (Joel Chandler Harris’ stories) to make a film of; but today, it would seem quite racist regarding
Blacks, almost like the old Amos ’n’ Andy
stuff.
URL 1:
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