More body swaps in a lesser movie

    During the first 15 minutes of Freakier Friday, a sequel to the popular 2003 movie, a food fight disrupts a high school bake sale. As the sloppy mayhem unfolded, I surrendered any hope that this broadly played cinematic reunion tour for Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan would bubble with Wildean wit.

  Working from a screenplay credited to a trio of writers, director Nisha Ganatra doubles the number of characters involved in body swaps from two to four, but that that doesn't make her movie any better than its predecessor. Sadly it's probably not as good.

  This time, the body-swapping adventures of Curtis and Lohan are joined by Julia Butters, as the daughter of Lohan's now-grown Anna, and Sophie Hammons, as Lily, a teenager who'll be blended into a new family should Anna go through with her plan to marry Lily's father, a widowed British restaurateur played by Manny Jacinto.

  Ganatra keeps things peppy as she builds toward the inevitable body swaps, this time resulting from the unwanted help of a faux psychic (Vanessa Bayer). 

   The idea behind the plot goes something like this: Both teenagers (Butters and Hammons) despise one another and have no desire to become stepsisters. Once they find themselves in different bodies, they follow a sitcom playbook, scheming to derail Anna and Eric's impending wedding. 

    Lohan and Butters do well, with Curtis' broader performance adding dashes of slapstick.  Hammons ably fulfills her obligations as a conceited London-raised teenager who hasn't gotten over the death of her mother. Lohan's Anna, by the way, opted for single motherhood long before the story began.

    All of this rattles on for one hour and 51 minutes while the characters learn how to resolve their problems.

    Look, because there's no suspense about how the movie will end, I don't consider it a spoiler to tell you that a truly freaky movie would have put Butters' 15-year-old Harper in her 36-year-old mother's body indefinitely, skipping the end of adolescence for the entrapments of middle age. 

   Too freaky? I suppose so.

   The movie has other things in mind as it works to generate  feel-good spirit, culminating with a showy musical production number involving Lohan, Butters, and a singer (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) Anna manages. Anna, we learn, became a talent agent after abandoning performing ambitions she displayed in the earlier movie, partly to concentrate on being a mom.

     Perhaps to provide connection points for those who loved the 2003 movie, the filmmakers contrive small roles for additional returnees, notably Stephen Tobolowsky, as an aging teacher, Chad Michael Murray, as Anna's old high school flame, and Mark Harmon, as Tess's husband.

    The movie's end credits feature outtakes that suggest the movie was fun to make. The performances capture some of that giddy flavor, but Freakier Friday wraps its family-oriented sentiments in a package that 22 years of aging hasn't done much to improve.*

    *For the record, I haven't seen the 1976 version of Freaky Friday that starred Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris.

     

She’s an assistant with big ambitions

The High Note may not top the charts, but it’s easy to take.

The High Note stands as one of those mediocre movies that prove watchable enough to make it worth a look. As cliche-ridden as it is glitzy, The High Note sneaks by with an attractive cast that keeps the movie moving toward its inevitable feel-good finale. Dakota Johnson plays Maggie, a young woman who works as an assistant to an R&B star Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross), a woman whose once-soaring career has hit its downside. Maggie may only be an assistant but she encourages Grace to break the mold that has made her successful and stake out new turf. Maggie's plan doesn't sit well with Jake (Ice Cube), Grace's long-time manager. He wants to stick with a greatest hits approach and book her into a long-running gig at a Las Vegas hotel. Meanwhile, Maggie hopes to start a career as a record producer. Lo, she meets a talented young singer (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) at a grocery store. Her belief in the young man's talent (and her natural feel for R&B) is supposed to be enough to launch a major career for Harrison's character. Johnson mixes naivete with charm in playing a character who qualifies as an R&B nerd. Maggie learned about R&B from her DJ dad (Bill Pullman), a guy who once hosted a powerhouse radio show in Los Angeles. Ross, daughter of Diana Ross, tempers Grace's diva bitchiness with enough humanity to keep her from becoming obnoxious. Some of the plot points in Flora Greeson's script tip from improbable to downright unbelievable but director Nisha Ganatra (Late Night) gives the production (and some of its musical numbers) plenty of gloss. I haven't done star ratings on movies in years, but if I did, The High Note would qualify as a quintessential example of the two-and-a-half star breed, a palatable if lesser entertainment.