Freaky Friday

“Freaky Friday”

The movie that I chose to review was titled “Freaky Friday.” It stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as a mother and daughter who switch bodies for a day. In this film, Tess Coleman (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) is a widowed psychiatrist juggling her job and family while planning her second marriage. Anna Coleman (played by Lindsay Lohan), who disapproves of her mother’s second marriage plans, is of no help to her mother at all during her stressful situations. Anna is a rebellious rocker who plays guitar in a garage band and would rather flirt with older boys than listen to her uptight mother.

One night, while the warring mother and daughter are at a Chinese restaurant, their fighting is overheard by an elderly Chinese grandmother who curses a fortune cookie, so that the angry mother and daughter will wake up the next morning in each other's bodies. Due to accepting and ingesting the fortune cookie, both Tess and Anna are there by forced to live in each other’s bodies for the day, in which it just so happens to be the day of Tess’s rehearsal dinner and Anna’s band audition at the House Of Blues. Of course, once Tess and Anna change places, they discover that the opposite person really does not have an easier life. For instance, Anna must listen to a litany of patient woes and panic at appointments while in the body of her mother and Tess gets bullied at school and must take a school placement exam while in the body of her teenage daughter.

This Disney movie shows many relationships to gender roles, family, and aggressiveness/anger. The notion of gender roles in the film is shown by the many tasks that Tess, the mother and head of the household, takes on. Tess is a very busy woman. She is always on the go for her job and carries a mess of handheld devices (including cell phones, pagers, PDIs, etc.) so that she can be reached very easily when she is not working. Tess is also the head of the household and is in charge of making sure that the basic physiological needs of her two children are met.

The family relationships in the movie that are obvious to the viewer include the bonding between mother and daughter and the idea of a single parent household. Through watching the movie, one can see that the bonding between Tess and Anna has changed from the beginning to the end. In the beginning of the movie, Anna and Tess are constantly arguing and not getting along. Anna does not like her mother bossing her around