How Freakier Friday failed Pink Slip and Take Me Away
When Lindsay Lohan revealed that she was taking guitar lessons to prepare for Freakier Friday, I got really excited at the prospect of her character Anna Coleman playing with Pink Slip again.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
One of my favourite aspects of 2003’s Freaky Friday was Anna’s look, vibe, the fact she was in a band called Pink Slip, could deliver the juicy riff in Take Me Away like a badass, and play guitar and perform lead vocals on Ultimate. Teenage me wanted to BE Anna. The best moment of the whole film, hands down, is when Jamie Lee Curtis‘s Tess (who’s actually Anna) performs the riff in the wings when you think Anna is about to flop mid-show. It’s awesome.
Naturally, I wanted more of Pink Slip in the sequel for nostalgia’s sake, but I didn’t know how it would realistically work character-wise. Anna is now 22 years older, she’s no longer in the band, and she’s a music manager with a teenage daughter named Harper (Julia Butters). She’s still friends with her former bandmates, though, as Maddie (Christina Vidal Mitchell) and Peg (Haley Hudson) are both at her bridal shower. With all those facts to hand, I expected – and would have been satisfied with – a full Pink Slip performance of Take Me Away to kick off the credits.
So I was not impressed with where director Nisha Ganatra decided to put the performance. Pink Slip basically takes over Anna’s client’s show (and I loved Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as Ella) to make Anna come out and perform her original song Baby, which she does with Harper (they’ve switched bodies at this point). That’s fine, I guess, but then once Baby is done and Anna’s made her grand gesture to Eric (Manny Jacinto), they just launch into Take Me Away. When I heard the opening bars, I was like, ‘Oh no, why here? It makes no sense.’
I appreciate that Ganatra recognised that this was a fan service moment that she needed to include (this is correct), but it feels awkwardly shoehorned in as there is no narrative reason for it. It made me happy to hear it, but the placement could have been better – namely, a full performance in the credits, where Lindsay’s guitar skills could have their chance to shine. In this version, there’s so much drama going on around the performance that the camera cuts away from it a lot, and parts of the song are only in the background.
I totally understand why Lohan, Mitchell and Hudson recorded a new version of Take Me Away – they are 20 years older after all. Vocally, I get it. But why change the music? Why change that awesome riff? It’s all quite subtle, and casual fans probably won’t notice, but I sure did! This is where I contradict myself: I don’t want repeats and carbon copies in general, but I got annoyed that they messed with the riff. I’m all for freshening things up and making them different, but only if it’s an improvement instead of a downgrade. In a similar vein, why get The Beaches to cover Ultimate for the credits when the original Pink Slip version is better?!
This makes it sound like I hate the new Freakier Friday. I truly don’t. I had the best time watching it and it would have been close to perfect if they hadn’t fumbled the music aspect.
Read my review here