The Lizzie McGuire Movie (2003) Hillary Duff, Adam Lamberg, Brenden Kelly, Yani Gellman, etc etc Zero stars out of four.
Capsule review: If you haven't seen "The Lizzie McGuire Movie", skip it and go see "What A Girl Wants" instead. If you've already seen "What A Girl Wants", skip "The Lizzie McGuire Movie" and go see "What A Girl Wants" again.
My office is in one corner of the media room upstairs, so I get to monitor what my daughter watches on TV while I work. This has turned out to be a valuable relationship -- else I wouldn't have known, for instance, that Cartoon Network switches to adult content after 9:00.
So yes, I've seen the Lizzie McGuire TV show, and I found it usually charming, sometimes clever, and occasionally funny. In other words, better than most of what passes for content on The Disney Channel.
My daughter loves the show, so when we saw the previews for The Lizzie McGuire movie, it was a sure bet that I'd have to take her to see it. Well, I thought, how bad could it be? The series is innocuous enough, and occasionally fun, so perhaps the film won't be a complete waste of time.
Flying in the face of this was "From the people who gave you The Princess Diaries" in huge letters on the adcopy. That's not necessarily a good thing. "The Princess Diaries" was as dull as a police report.
Interestingly enough, "The people who gave you The Princess Diaries" apparently does not include the director, who has done practically nothing before directing "The Lizzie McGuire Movie". This explains a lot. To say the direction is amateurish is not really fair. It's not so much that as banal.
There seemed to be only two shots -- the chaotic, extreme close-up and midrange at about three feet off the ground, and they jumped back and forth with jarring irregularity. No tracking, pan and wide shots, few boom and crane shots... it's like the entire film was done at waist level by a couple of guys with steadi-cams. Why in Heaven's name take an entire film crew to Rome just to shoot vacation footage?
It got creepy after awhile. Hillary skips down stairs and does a cartwheel on a landing, and the scene could have been really cute and spontaneous except all we see is a huge five-foot-wide belly button rotating on the screen. I dunno, maybe it'll play better on TV.
This film practically coined the term "the three sequin close-up", that being the number of sequins there was room for in entirely too many shots. You know how your friends bring back footage of their European vacation, and it's all noses and teeth? Like that.
Part of the reason for the claustrophobic camera work appears to be that none of the principles do their own dancing. Yani Gellman is credited with a "dance double" and Hillary with two. (One of her dance doubles has ridiculously muscular calves.) The extreme close-ups and rapid cuts make the dance numbers look like they were patched together from an hundred takes. Maybe they were.
The odd thing about this is that we know, from Duff's own show, that she can dance. Oh, she's no Paula Abdul, but she's good enough for the pedestrian moves and turns required for the film. Why then, didn't they stay at it until they got a good take?
The plethora of close-ups highpoint Hillary's garish make-up. It looked like she applied it herself.
The plot is pedestrian and predictable, sort-of a remake of Roman Holiday (1953), which would be ok if they'd taken advantage of the location, (let's have some SCENERY people, we're in ROME, ya know) or included any of the snappy dialog of which the series writers are capable. As it is, the script just goes through the motions, churning out the bare minimum of dialog and plot to be called a film.
Duff should rethink her contract with Disney.
The supporting characters don't help much. The series regulars look bored, Alex Borstein chews up the scenery as the tour guide, love interest Yani Gellman hardly changes expression or tone, even when the plot requires him to be angry or embarrassed.
As I said, I like the series, and I'm trying to think of something nice to say about the film. All I can think of is Hillary's scooter stunt double has a nice butt.
Ron
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