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Luckily, such quantum-physics complexities are largely absent from the body-switch comedy "Freaky Friday" - here, it merely takes an enchanted fortune cookie and a few wise words to cause a harried mom (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her sullen teen daughter (Lindsay Lohan) to switch bodies. (Apparently, the heathen Chinese have managed to find a way to control the minds and souls of people using only a tiny pastry-perhaps Nixon was right all along.) The ensuing antics are familiar-this is, after all, the third time that Disney has filmed this Mary Rodgers book (once with Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris and once with Shelly Long)-but smartly updated: the daughter has been made a little older, for example, lending more of an edge to the conflicts. While the film never really breaks free to become a truly inspired comedy, Curtis and Lohan are pretty good at suggesting each other’s personality and it chugs along amiably enough to warrant a recommendation-provided, of course, that you have already seen far superior tween-girl sagas like "Whale Rider" and "Bend It Like Beckham."

"Buffalo Soldiers" has been a hot potato ever since Miramax picked up the distribution rights to the film-about a circa-1989 U.S. Army base in Germany seemingly manned entirely by bored ex-cons and junkies-on September 10, 2001. Since then, they have added and dropped it from their schedule several times and are now releasing it at a time when any criticism of the government or the military is apparently frowned upon. The final film, however, hardly seems worth all of the fuss-after a funny first hour (illustrating the depths that peacetime soldiers will sink to alleviate boredom when there isn’t a war to fight-"Peace is ------- boring", as one puts it) following scam artist Joaquin Phoenix as he tries to outwit the new no-nonsense sergeant (Scott Glenn) by winning the heart of the man’s daughter (Anna Paquin), it quickly devolves into a series of scenes that uneasily try to blend explosions, firefights and ham-fisted cynicism without much success. There are some good scenes throughout (especially a drug-fueled tank rampage during a series of war games) but the film, as a whole, gets pretty old pretty fast: it isn’t anti-American, just repetitive.

One of the more unusual summer-camp comedies in recent memory, "Camp" chronicles a summer at Camp Ovation, a getaway for kids to learn the ins-and-outs of the theater world (while the film is fictional, it is loosely based on a real retreat called Stagedoor Manor, whose alumni include Natalie Portman and Todd Graff, the writer-director of this film), with all the backstabbing, romantic complications and life-changing moments that no coming-of-age film should be without. Although the idea of being stuck in the wilderness with 500 kids singing "God, I Hope I Get It!" is frankly terrifying to me, Graff’s film is a sweet and funny movie that will appeal even to people with absolutely no interest in theater.

The relatively unknown performers are all pretty good-they shine even where the script sometimes lets them down-but I must cite one in particular. Anna Kendrick (already a Broadway vet and Tony nominee at the age of 18) appears as the mousy girl who acts as the indentured servant to the Popular Girl-when she is scorned once to often, she enacts a "Heathers"-inspired revenge and tops it with a show-stopping rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s "Ladies Who Lunch". She only has a small role but the force of it is galvanizing-when she leaves the screen, the rest of the film never quite recovers from her absence.

Copyright © 2003 Peter Sobczynski
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While the views expressed by Peter Sobczynski do not necessarily reflect the views of Criticdoctor.com, the Critic Doctor will occasionally examine Mr. Sobczynski's film reviews to bring forth an honest examination of those views expressed.