Latest news with #body-swapping
Geek Vibes Nation
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Vibes Nation
'All Of Me' (1984) Blu-Ray Review - Steve Martin & Lily Tomlin Elevate Body Swap Comedy
Making its Blu-ray debut, this comedy classic starring legends Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin is a riotous tale of body-swapping misadventures. Bachelor Roger Cobb (Martin) is a lawyer who dreams of playing jazz. Edwina Cutwater (Tomlin) is a millionairess who dreams of inhabiting a new body. But the guru responsible for Edwina's soul relocation goofs, and she ends up in a very different body…Roger's! Now, with one half of himself controlled by Edwina — and his job and sanity in jeopardy — Roger is in for a wild and crazy ride that will show him both what manhood really means, and the hilarity that can result when two literally become one. For thoughts on All of Me, please check out my thoughts on No Streaming Required: Video Quality All of Me finally makes its Blu-Ray debut with a 1080p transfer that is among the weaker ones we have seen from the Vestron line. Even still, it proves to be an upgrade from any previous release. There are no details provided about the origins of the transfer, but this appears to be derived from either an underwhelming source or a dated master that has not had a substantial amount of work done to it. The rumor is that the original film elements were destroyed in the Universal fire in 2008, but we cannot substantiate that claim. The Vestron line is no stranger to using older masters, but consumers may balk at the additional cost that comes from being part of the Lionsgate Limited imprint as opposed to the budget releases from the past several years. We appreciate having this in HD in some form rather than it being MIA forever, but fans should keep expectations in check. The transfer has thankfully not been DNR'd to hell and retains its naturally filmic qualities with only intermittent instances of inconsistent or clumpy grain. This is far from the crispest transfer we have ever seen, but there is some fine detail in the landscapes, production design, and texture of the clothing. Quality shifts from location to location as the film can look either pleasantly clear and detailed or soft and lacking crisp outlines. There are fleeting specks of print damage present in the transfer that did not get cleaned up, but debris is kept to a minimum. Colors are a bit lifeless outside of small bursts of saturation in some of the outdoor events. Largely, the color timing feels a bit askew or anemic. Black levels could use some work, but they are acceptable in their depth. Highlights avoid the worst instances of blooming. We wished this looked better, but it will get the job done who want a passable HD transfer. Audio Quality Lionsgate Home Entertainment brings us this new Blu-Ray with the original lossless theatrical LPCM 2.0 mix that holds up better than the video side of things. The track confidently and accurately reproduces the soundscape of the narrative. Dialogue holds up without issue, coming through clearly without being drowned out by the music or sound effects. The environmental effects are firm, from the milling about at the party to the voiceover taking place within Roger's head. The stereo track really helps the movie feel a bit more spacious. The music that always holds up with top-notch fidelity. This track accomplishes what it sets out to do. Optional English, English (SDH), and Spanish subtitles are provided on this disc. Special Features Audio Commentary: Film Historian Joe Ramoni delivers an informative commentary track in which he discusses the creation of the film, the careers of the talent at the time, the legacy of the film, and so much more. Back In The Bowl – An Interview with Screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson: A new 26-minute interview with the writer in which he discusses the development of the script, learning from Carl Reiner, the unusual collaborations with Lily Tomlin, the evolving nature of various characters, and more. Bodies Behaving Badly – A Video Essay by Film Critic Cerise Howard: A nearly 29-minute visual essay that explores the body swap genre, challenging gender norms, and more. Hilarity Ensues – A Video Essay by Hollywood Historian Staci Layne Wilson: A nearly 17-minute visual essay that explores the comedic output of the stars, how their talents are utilized throughout All of Me , and more. Trailers: This disc provides the Theatrical Trailer (2:35) and the Teaser Trailer (1:29). TV Spots (2:12) Still Gallery (7:18) Final Thoughts All of Me is an amusing outing from Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin that is not name-checked very often when discussing either performer. Tomlin is somewhat hindered by not having a physical presence on screen for much of the runtime, but she makes the most of her role. Martin is given a chance to really tap into his physical comedy prowess, but you should also be on the lookout for some surprising pathos that comes through at different points. It is not the last word on 'body swap' movies, but it is a good time for anyone who enjoys either performer. Lionsgate Home Entertainment has released a new Blu-Ray through their Vestron Video Collector's Series featuring an inconsistent A/V presentation and a valuable array of special features. Recommended All of Me is currently available to purchase on Blu-Ray exclusively through Lionsgate Limited. Note: Images presented in this review are not reflective of the image quality of the Blu-Ray. Disclaimer: Lionsgate Home Entertainment has supplied a copy of this disc free of charge for review purposes. All opinions in this review are the honest reactions of the author.
Forbes
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Freakier Friday' Cast Then Vs. Now—See How The Original 2003 Stars Have Changed
Freakier Friday, the reboot of the beloved 2003 remake, is now playing in theaters everywhere. The film reunites the iconic on-screen mother-daughter duo Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan for another round of body-swapping. In the 2003 film, mystical Chinese fortuane cookies cause Anna (Lohan), a rebellious teenager, and her psychologist mom, Tess (Curtis), to swap bodies, forcing them to experience each other's lives and learn valuable lessons along the way. Two decades later, the mother-daughter team is back for another round. Anna is all grown up and a mother herself, with a daughter, Harper (Julia Butters), and a soon-to-be stepdaughter, Lily (Sophia Hammons). Instead of a two-way switch, the sequel ups the chaos with a four-way body swap. 'Two decades after an identity crisis, Anna's blended family faces new challenges. Tess and Anna discover their past may be repeating with the next generation,' the synopsis reads. Several familiar faces from the 2003 film return, including Chad Michael Murray, Mark Harmon, Christina Vidal Mitchell, Haley Hudson and more. Keep reading to see how the main Freakier Friday cast has changed since the 2003 film, as well as the new additions for 2025. Freakier Friday Cast Then Vs. Now With more than twenty years between the 2003 film and the 2025 reboot, see how some of the returning Freakier Friday stars have changed. Lindsay Lohan reprises her role as Anna Coleman in Freakier Friday. She was 16 years old during filming and 17 when the original movie was released. Now 39, Lohan's return in Freakier Friday is one of the few films she has taken on since resuming her acting career in 2022. She has starred in several Netflix rom-coms, including Falling for Christmas (2022), Irish Wish (2024) and Our Little Secret (2024). Jamie Lee Curtis is also back as Anna's mother, Tess, in Freakier Friday. On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the Oscar-winning actress said she got the ball rolling on the sequel after looking up Lohan's age to see if she could play the mother of a teenager. In 2023, Curtis won an Academy Award for her supporting role in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Everyone's favorite 2000s heartthrob, Chad Michael Murray, is also reprising his role as Jake, Anna's crush in the 2003 film. 'For Jake in particular, I think we're going to be excited to see what he's been pining over for the past 22 years,' the actor teased in an interview with ABC News. Following Freaky Friday, Murray went on to star in A Cinderella Story alongside Hilary Duff and played Lucas Scott in One Tree Hill from 2003 to 2012. While many know Mark Harmon for his iconic role as Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS, he also had a minor role in Freaky Friday as Ryan, Tess Coleman's fiancé and later husband. He returns to reprise his role in Freakier Friday, nearly three years after leaving NCIS, though he still narrates the prequel series, NCIS: Origins. In 2003, Ryan Malgarini portrayed Harry Coleman, Anna's younger brother and Tess' son. 'I was really excited,' he told The Hollywood Reporter about his reaction when he heard the news about the sequel. 'I stepped away for a couple years from acting in my mid-twenties, so when they said they wanted me to come back, I was genuinely surprised.' After Freaky Friday, he went on to appear in How to Eat Fried Worms (2006) and the Disney film Go Figure (2005). Christina Vidal played Maddie, one of Anna's friends and Pink Slip bandmates, in Freaky Friday (2003). She appears in the reboot as well, and she and co-star Haley Hudson surprised fans with performances at Disneyland and the film's world premiere. "This is a dream,' Vidal told HOLA! in an interview about reprising her role as Maddie. 'It's a blessing. I never would have imagined this actually happening.' She's also appeared in Code Black, Training Day and Primo. Fans will also recognize Haley Hudson, another one of Anna's friends and Pink Slip bandmates. She went on to star in Marley & Me and appear in shows like Weeds and The Mentalist. In 2014, she played Stevie in the horror film The Pact II. Who's New To The Freakier Friday Cast? The reboot also welcomes several new faces, including Julia Butters as Harper Coleman, Anna Coleman's daughter, and Sophia Hammons as Lily Davies, Anna's soon-to-be stepdaughter. Meanwhile, Manny Jacinto (The Good Place) plays Anna's fiancé, Eric Davies. Never Have I Ever's Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is also part of the Freakier Friday cast. She sings a new track for the film, which she called a dream come true. "I feel so blessed to be part of this film," she said, per ABC7. "My scenes are with Lindsay and Jamie-I mean, come on-and I get a song!" Freakier Friday is playing in theaters everywhere. Watch the official trailer below.
New York Times
07-08-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Freakier Friday' Review: Round and Round, Here We Go Again
I doubt Mary Rodgers imagined that her 1972 body-swapping novel 'Freaky Friday' would still be getting reincarnated over 50 years later. It's a simple plot: A teenage girl and her mother accidentally exchange places for a day, and thus learn some empathy for each other — kind of a comedic version of 'walk a mile in another man's shoes,' a concept so simple that multiple generations have enjoyed their own retellings. The novel spawned several sequels, and there have been a whole bunch of films, some remakes of one another, updated for a new era. We apparently really just like the whole idea, plus it's a cash cow for Disney, who owns the rights to most of these peculiar Fridays. 'Freakier Friday,' is the latest movie in the lineage, and a direct sequel to the 2003 film, which starred Lindsay Lohan as a disaffected teen named Anna and Jamie Lee Curtis as her mother, Tess. This one, directed by Nisha Ganatra with a screenplay by Jordan Weiss, is clearly aimed at the many audience members who watched and rewatched the previous film over the last 22 years. And that's no small audience: While the quintessential Lohan role is Cady in 'Mean Girls' (2004), her turn as Anna — and then as Tess, in Anna's body — is a close second. 'Freaky Friday' also boasted a memorable soundtrack for millennials of a certain age, including a particular movie critic who harbors fond memories of cruising down the highway blasting Forty Foot Echo's 'Brand New Day' from her car CD player that August. Anyhow. I'd say 'enough nostalgia,' but with a movie like 'Freakier Friday' there can't be enough nostalgia, because nostalgia is its reason for being. (This one even brings back Chad Michael Murray, whom reliable sources tell me even some of today's teens find crushable.) At least some of those original viewers are parents of their own daughters now. Anna is, too; her daughter is named Harper (Julia Butters), whom Anna chose to have as a single mother but Tess enthusiastically 'grand-coparents,' as Tess puts it on her podcast. (We are in 2025, after all.) Anna had a career as a rocker with her band, Pink Slip — that's the band we met in the original movie — but retired from performing when Harper came along, and now she manages a volatile but talented pop star named Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). Because this is a 'Freaky Friday' movie, we're gonna have some body swappage, but some pieces need to slide into place first. I'll just hint at a few of them. First: Harper has a lab partner named Lily (Sophia Hammons) whom she cannot stand, mostly because Lily is from London and cannot stop talking about how much better she is than everyone else. Unfortunately, after Lily and Harper get in a fight, Anna and Lily's father, Eric (Manny Jacinto, a most welcome screen presence) meet in the principal's office and, wouldn't you know it, they fall in love. Lily and Harper are going to wind up stepsisters, unless they figure out how to break their parents up. And now, the magic can happen. In the movies, body swapping can work in both horror and comedy registers. In horror movies, swapped bodies make us feel loss of control or loss of identity. Maybe we feel what it is to lose command of our own physical form, or we feel the distress of discovering someone we thought we knew is now someone else — 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers,' for instance, remains one of the most chilling sci-fi horror premises ever executed for a reason. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Associated Press
06-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Movie Review: The body-swappers are back! Lohan, Curtis return for chaotic sequel ‘Freakier Friday'
It's a tale as old as time — or at least, a tale Hollywood loves to tell again and again: Body-swapping. It's magical. It's comical. It carries heartwarming messages about walking in another's shoes, and learning about oneself along the way. So it's hardly surprising that 'Freaky Friday,' the 2003 version of the 1972 Mary Rodgers novel starring Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, was a hit. Lohan was endearing and charismatic as an appealing, mildly turbulent teenager, and Curtis was a comic hoot as her control-freak therapist mom. And while there were a few misfires — the stereotypical Asian representation has aged badly — the film was powered by an easy chemistry between the two stars. So why not revisit the story in 2025? Sequels are often made for far less compelling reasons. The chief weakness of 'Freakier Friday' — which brings Curtis and Lohan back for an amiable, often joyful and certainly chaotic reunion — is that while it hews overly closely to the structure, storyline and even dialogue of the original, it tries too hard to up the ante. The comedy is thus a bit more manic, and the plot machinations more overwrought (or sometimes distractingly silly). Then there's the double body-swapping. Because one major swap isn't enough, here we have two sets of swappers — a quixotic quartet of lives disrupted during the lead-up to, yes, another wedding! The problem is that sometimes, it's actually hard to keep track of who's inhabiting whom, and therefore why they're doing what. Not to say that 'Freakier Friday,' directed with gusto by Nisha Ganatra, doesn't have moments of comic glee. I'll admit to laughing out loud — with everyone else older than 30 near me — when two teens were trying to locate an adult contact and one of them pulled up Facebook, explaining: 'It's like a database of old people!' Touché, guys. These 'youngsters' are actually Lohan and Curtis, playing ninth-graders trapped in adult bodies. Before we get to that, though: We begin 22 years after we last saw Lohan's Anna, playing electric guitar at her mom's wedding. Now a single mom herself with a job managing a young pop star, she's trying to get her daughter up for school. Harper (the excellent Julia Butters) is — surprise! — an appealing, mildly turbulent teenager. And just like Anna two decades ago, she keeps people out of her bedroom. 'Prepare to be triggered!' Anna yells before barging in. (The dialogue has been duly updated to the present time.) Driving to school drop-off, Anna is joined by her mom, Tess (Curtis), who has stylish gray hair now and is still a practicing therapist, podcaster and author whose latest topic is 'Rebelling with Respect.' Dropping Harper off, Anna calls out 'Make good choices!' — just what mom Tess used to say, natch. At school, Harper butts heads with transfer student Lily (Sophia Hammons), a budding fashion designer who hails from Britain and is very snooty. Anna is called to see the principal. There, she meets Lily's dishy chef dad Eric (Manny Jacinto), and the two flirt so intensely, the principal herself makes them a dinner reservation. All it takes is one cute dating montage, and poof, Anna and Eric are engaged. But things are still bad between Harper and Lily, whose animosity triggers a weirdly violent, all-school food fight on bake sale day. But they all have a bachelorette party to attend. There, a wacky fortune-teller and barista and business-card maker — Vanessa Bayer, in a cameo that perhaps, no definitely goes on too long — reads their palms. And then the earth starts shaking. 'Freaky' fans know what happens next. The four awaken the next morning, each inhabiting someone else. Anna is Harper. Tess is Lily. Harper is Anna. Lily is Tess. We'll be testing you on this later! Seriously, it's easy to lose the thread. Also, one wonders: why doesn't Lily's British accent travel with her to Tess's body? If Curtis suddenly had a British accent, the pairing would make a lot more sense. Anyway, they go about their days. Lily, in Tess' body, plays pickleball awkwardly with husband Ryan (Mark Harmon is back, in a thankless part). Harper, in Anna's body, goes to a pre-wedding tango lesson with Eric, with disastrous results. Meanwhile Anna and Tess, in their teen bodies, feast on junk food with impunity. 'I haven't eaten real dairy since the Bush administration,' one says. Curtis, aka Lily, gets her best moment in a drugstore, when her hubby asks her to get supplies from the 'senior' aisle, and she stockpiles everything from adult diapers to enemas. Lohan's at her comic best when, as Harper, she tries to flirt the way she thinks her mother would. She's flirting with Jake (Chad Michael Murray) — yes, the hunky guy from the original — and her flirting is so weird, Jake thinks she's having a stroke. It all barrels toward a conclusion that we won't spoil. Will the wedding be derailed by the efforts of Lily and Harper? Will that derailment be temporary? Will the sisters-to-be reach an understanding? Will Lohan get to play the electric guitar? Will everyone grow to appreciate each other? That last question, we can answer. Of course they will. Whoever they are, and whatever they just did. 'Freakier Friday,' a Walt Disney Studios release, has been rated PG by the Motion Picture Association 'for thematic elements, rude humor, language and some suggestive references.' Running time: 111 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
