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In the annals of human events — specifically, those annals having to do with making your Wonderful Girlfriend happy — it often becomes necessary to watch movies one would not otherwise watch. Thus, I quite fortunately came to see “Freaky Friday”:http://www.imdb.com/Title?0322330.
_Freaky Friday_ has a simple plot — a mother and teenage daughter switch bodies for a day and learn to appreciate each others’ trials and challenges in life. By understanding each other better, they become closer and yadda yadda yadda cue sappy strings. The resulting picture is neither as contrived nor as boring as it might seem.
It’s, frankly, a bit freaky that I enjoyed this film more than my Wonderful Girlfriend, who’s probably much more exemplary of the movie’s target demographic than am I. She thought it was nice but a bit cookie-cutter; I disagreed with the latter assessment.
This is not to deny that _Freaky Friday_ is filled with cliches; it sure is. Oh, and there are plenty of moments when you just know what is going to happen next. But this movie proves that the difference between “seen it a million times” and “oh that was pretty amusing” is execution and attention to detail; _Freaky Friday_ scores high on both.
The foundation comes from a sound script. Not overly original, it does have a few key traits that most scripts are missing:
* Realistic dialogue both for the mother and for the daughter, leaving us with conversation that doesn’t sound contrived and doesn’t overreach either for maturity or for youthful hipness
* Simple, familiar characters with easy-to-understand motivations who behave in ways that make sense
* A stunning lack of plot holes, _deus ex machina_, etc.; the movie’s plot just moves itself along naturally
Follow this up with solid acting of the type needed in a silly teenage movie such as this; even the bit players leave the right taste in your mouth. In a movie populated by stereotypes and, even worse, teenage actors and even younger kids, audience members have got to steel themselves for scenes that are real stinkers thanks to the complete inability of the actors involved therein to pull of their lines or character. Not so in _Freaky Friday_! Jaime Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan are perfect as the switched mother and daughter, both playing mature and young-and-hip with equal ease and conviction. Mark Harmon is just cute and rich enough to be believable as Curtis’s future husband. The tyke who plays the youngest child in the household is funny and unselfconscious, and grandpa is convincingly addled. The hot boy is dumb but sincere (and maybe not as dumb as he seems), and the teachers are convincingly dull and useless.
Heck, in this one they even got the music right — _Freaky Friday_ is filled with the kind of bubblegum-pop-posing-as-punk that the kids seem to love today. And there’s even a bunch of punk rock girls who I’m not allowed to think are cute for another year or so.
The soundtrack is just one of the details _Freaky Friday_ got right. With no scenes that drag on and none that are cut short, with well-dressed sets, the director and crew of this production kept their eyes on the ball. And the actors were in character for even the littlest scenes, with the right posture and body movements and every line convincingly delivered by the character who said it (well, except for the Big Speech At The End That Provides Closure, but this kind of movie has to have that so we’ll give it a free pass).
It’s these details that ultimately make _Freaky Friday_ a complete and well-executed film, and that’s why the subject of this entry is a good, fun movie well worth a DVD rental.

Reading “Seabiscuit the book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0449005615/ was a magical experience, and I knew from the beginning that it would be quite a feat for “the movie”:http://www.imdb.com/Title?0329575 to come close.
The book appears, on first read, to be a perfect candidate to be turned into a movie. It’s exciting, it’s filled with great and vivid characters, and it’s wonderfully paced.
The script used in the movie, however, illustrates how difficult it is to turn a story with such sweep into a movie. Introducing all of the characters and covering all of the events is an incredible challenge, and the movie justifiably drops a lot of detail about people and even entire events.
Many critics complain that it takes over 30 minutes for Seabiscuit the horse to make his first appearance in the movie. Now, the book’s author, Laura Hillenbrand, takes her own good time in bringing in the horse in the book, to very little detriment to the final product. But the technique fares less well in the theater, and the beginning of the movie drags a bit because you’ve no idea where the plot is going.
Our main characters are introduced straight away, and Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper and Tobey Maguire are brought to us in touching manners. But the emphasis on these characters continues throughout the movie, to the substantial exclusion of Seabiscuit himself. The horse is lost as a character — he’s the center of the movie but has little enough personality.
Certainly, physically Seabiscuit (or the dozens of horses who play him) is exactly right — too small, knobby-kneed and with an awful gait. I can only imagine the owners of the horses who were hired to play our hero, suddenly offered money so that their ungainly cart horses could appear on screen. It must’ve been quite a shock!
Seabiscuit’s opponent War Admiral is also well-cast — the horses playing him are enormous, muscled, sleek and dark. But so little time is spent on this horse that we’re left at a loss as to why he might be popular in his own right. No Maverick vs. Iceman is this — viewers of _Seabiscuit_ will have no argument over who to favor, nobody will come away favoring the coldly efficient War Admiral over the jaunty and personably misfit Seabiscuit. Something’s been lost there, I fear, when it’s all black-and-white.
Also disappointing was Elizabeth Banks as Marcela Howard, Jeff Bridges’ wife. Marcela was supposed to be of Mexican descent, but the actress’s accent was simply that of a ditzy modern woman. Marcela was played with plenty of the strength necessary, and even the proper bearing, but out came a sheen of low class every time she opened her mouth. Where did this woman come from in the midst of a classy cast playing their characters to a t?
Well, not 100% to a t. see, Chris Cooper, playing trainer Tom Smith, has lines. Smith was a famously silent person, monosyllabic to a fault. It’s obviously difficult to move a movie forward with a character who has very few lines, but Cooper should at least have spoken at length only when necessary.
Many of Cooper’s lines could have been offloaded to the narrators. That’s narrators, plural, which is kind of bizarre and which works poorly. PBS’s David McCullough narrates a great deal at the beginning, setting the scene for the movie and making it feel like a documentary. Later, William H. Macy comes in as the fictitious racetrack announcer Tick-Tock McGlaughlin and the narration switches from ultra-serious History Channel-style to wacky radio voiceovers. The change is confusing and even a bit disruptive to the feel of the movie. One or the other would’ve worked better. Tick-Tock could certainly have been an appropriate foil for the viewer, entirely unfamiliar (as many are today) with horses and racing; he could’ve explained almost every detail to us in the didactic manner that announcers can adopt.
All of this is not to say that Seabiscuit is an awful movie. Far from it — scene after scene is touching and well-played, the plot is coherent, and the script is filled with good lines. Even real-world jockey Gary Stevens as on-screen jockey “Iceman” Woolf is great. The races are exciting and well-shot. But, see, the book was almost perfect, so the standard I’m holding the movie to is unfair and unachievable. At that, it still stacks up tolerably.

When I saw the first previews for “Gangs Of New York”:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0217505, I thought “now there’s a disaster writ large.” Further previews just reinforced this impression, and the uneven reviews seemed like a sign that, well, Scorcese succeeded in fooling half the people all time. I was just as happy to stay in the other half.
So I came into seeing this DVD with a prejudice. But, I felt like a Big Movie, and it did have all of the Oscar nods and whatnot going for it. Maybe something I should see, eh?
In Big Period Piece such as this, there are a few concerns one has right off the bat — regardless of the specific picture, really. These are:
# Is it just Too Darned Long?
# Is it too much of a melodrama?
# Is it too little of a melodrama?
# Is there any pretense at historical accuracy, or must one suspend disbelief?
# Can anybody in the darned thing act?
# Did they have any idea how to finish the pic?
As generic questions, these must be considered first. After surviving this gantlet, the movie can be judged on its specific traits — but if it fails the majority of the above tests, it can be consigned to the scrap-heap without any actual thought.
So, in order:
# Gangs Of New York was not too long
# Gangs Of New York did not really go overboard on the melodrama
# But, at the same time, Scorcese (and Daniel Day-Lewis!) totally appreciated the melodramatic aspects of the movie and used them to their advantage
# Seems pretty accurate, and shows an overlooked perspective of a well-known time
# At a minimum, Day-Lewis and a bunch of the supporting cast can act; Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz we’ll consider seperately
# No, Scorcese had no idea how to finish this (we call this “French Director’s Disease”)
So Gangs Of New York makes it by, too many strikes against it for greatness but plenty of check-marks to get a star and maybe even a smiley face sticker.
This movie cannot be considered without concentrating on the man whose character lies at its center and whose acting dominates every scene. Daniel Day-Lewis plays the evil Bill The Butcher to absolute perfection. Every line is delivered just right, every motion carries the nuance of the character. There is not a moment when you doubt how this man becomes the leader he is; there are many moments when everyone seems to be a supporting character orbiting about him.
Also nominated for an Academy Award ™ was Cameron Diaz, who performs creditably but in no particular way any better than much of the rest of the supporting cast. Like many, she’s afflicted with an occasional Irish accent. Her part is smaller than it seems, which does her no favors either; she’s given no chance to take over the screen.
Leo is given such a chance, but this is no Titanic. He entirely lacks the hard edge his character ought to have; perhaps a Joaquin Phoenix or, dare I say, Colin Farrell would have been a better choice. DiCaprio seems nothing but young throughout, and while his tough has much the aspect of a up-and-coming thug, it’s an aspect lent by his general air of Tom Saywerishness, not his inner strength.
The script, however, is good enough to move on even with this weak actor in the lead. Even follows naturally from event and even the moments in which Leo needs to be strong are not sunk by his softness. But it’s really the scenes featuring Day-Lewis, especially the throwaway ones, that give the movie its tone and continuity.
At the end the movie falters. To have our two heroes face each other down would be so obvious as to be anticlimactic, but there’s no reason to end the movie any other way. So the rest of America intrudes, for the one and only time; but it’s been foreshadowed so well that you don’t notice.
And it’s the end that I had the most problems with philosophically as well. Sure the draft is an awful thing, and sure many immigrants were exploited into joining the Union army during the Civil War. But, historically, those immigrants ended the war not Irish, or German, but American — sharing experiences and a language with the people they were going home to live with. thus the draft stirred and heated our melting pot. And the immigrants who died — and there were many, but it was not just immigrants who died, for the Civil War was a meat grinder — died for the cause of freedom.
That, I suppose, was Scorcese’s final message — that those who fought in the Gangs of New York died for freedom in their own way as well. And that, folks, is a Big Message to end this review of a Big Film.