Freaky (2020)

½ star
Freaky is so bad it makes me want to watch The Hot Chick all over again even though I didn't care for Rob Schneider's lame body switching movie. Just when this genre has seemingly run its course, along comes another filmmaker who thinks he can revive it. The guilty party this time is Christopher Landon, the writer/director of the decent Happy Death Day series. His attempt to meld the body switching movie with horror and comedy is a disaster. More than that, it's pitiful. The opening kills were badly staged and completely unfunny, and it's all downhill from there. The plot involves an ancient dagger that can cause the attacker and victim to switch bodies. Landon's stab at the concept involves switching members of the opposite sex, an idea that has been explored only a handful of times, but I've never really seen a movie mine this scenario to its fullest potential. The one that I think did it the best was 2006's It's a Boy Girl Thing. I already mentioned Rob Schneider's middling comedy, which focused too much on Rachel McAdams in Schneider's body and not the other way around.

Whiplash (2014)

★★
Whiplash is a great film and does everything right until it is nearly over. It makes a fatal error at the 11th hour and completely upends everything that came before. That is a shame, because there is so much to like about writer/director Damien Chazelle's searing drama of musical mayhem. The acting is phenomenal. The dialogue is sometimes over the top in a way that was pleasing to my ears. The jazz numbers come at you like they were fired out of a cannon. This is a gripping and powerful movie up until the moment Chazelle changes the dynamic between student and teacher. Instead of a hero who defeats his archenemy, we get a hero who validates his archenemy's methods. I don't know if Chazelle meant to do that or if he just completely lost track of his set up and its logical payoff. I don't regret seeing this. I'm almost tempted to recommend it to everyone in my orbit. The movie's high audience and critic scores on Rotten Tomatoes are not lost on me. I wonder why so few saw what I saw.