Disney's 'Freaky Friday' (2003)

It may be unpopular to say this these days, what with schaudenfreude and all, but I liked the "Freaky Friday" remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan."

"Freaky Friday" ostensibly is based on the book by Mary Rodgers, though Evangeline (who read the book and enjoyed it) assures me that neither movie follows the book too closely. In a nutshell, the plot is that a mother and her daughter end up switching bodies and seeing life through one another's eyes for an entire day. In the original movie, it was because they both wished they could change places, at the same time; in the remake, it was because of a Chinese fortune cookie gone bad.

The original movie, made in the early 1970s with Jodie Foster, was decent enough. The girls liked the funny stuff, like when the police chased Annabel to the marina and suffered one mishap after another -- a squad car gets cut in two at one point, though neither officer is hurt -- but the movie never got past the obvious jokes. (Nor particularly past some rather narrowly defined expectations for young girls. All Foster's Annabel wanted to do was to put on makeup and brush her hair.)

The remake goes for the laughs, and it delivers. Made only five years ago, it presents a drastically altered treatment of the story.

The original mother was a stay-at-home mom, and presented no real between mother and the daughter beyond how each failed to appreciate what the other's life was like. As a result it never progressed much beyond the expected and tired jokes about a teenager getting overwhelmed by laundry, carpet cleaners and other housewife duties, at least until mother and daughter return to their own bodies.

The remake follows a widow (Jamie Lee Curtis) set to remarry and her 15-year-old daughter (Lindsay Lohan), who resents the interloper, and plays heavily into the dynamic of a mother who does not understand her daughter as well as she thinks she does, as well as the fish-out-of-water daughter in her mother's body.

Jamie Lee Curtis kicks ass. So does Lindsay Lohan for that matter. She doesn't upstage Curtis, but she definitely plays a better teen and mother-in-teen's-body than Foster did.

So while the first one went for the standard yuk-yuk-yuks, the remake reinterprets the story in some impressive and imaginative ways. It got more laughs from me, and deeper ones, than the original did, and went quite a bit further with the character development. It's not really clear that Annabel and her mother changed all that much in the original "Freaky Friday"; in the remake, the movie spends more time establishing their difficulties, and shows them realizing how selfish and myopic they've been about their relationship. By the time it's over, there has been major character growth for both of them.

I also saw the remake of "The Parent Trap," or most of it anyway, a while ago. It's not nearly as clever or as inventive as this one. It follows the original movie way too closely to have been worth doing. In my opinion anyway.