Headscratchers / Freaky Friday (2003)

• Tess-in-Anna has to play guitar for Anna's band, but doesn't know how. So Anna-In-Tess plugs in behind stage and plays for her. Being a guitarist himself, this troper knows that muscle memory is a huge part of one's playing ability, and Tess's body would have neither the muscle memory nor the conditioning necessary to play anything more complicated than a power chord.
  • Not everyone would know that, would they?
    • Explain? It doesn't matter to the audience. In the film, though, it shows Anna-in-Tess playing the guitar with Tess-in-Anna "finger syncing". But neither of them would be able to play at all, since the mental and physical part (both important) are separated.
    • Muscle memory is stored in the hippocampus (part of the brain), actually.
  • Rule of Cool? It did look majorly awesome when Jamie Lee Curtis rocked that solo.
  • I was more confused as to why everyone cheered on Tess as Anna when she clearly wasn't moving her fingers or putting her hand anywhere near where the notes were. Is no one in the audience watching her? And even if they weren't, wouldn't the people running the contest notice that she's clearly doing the guitar equivalent of lip-syncing? It just doesn't make sense that they'd be able to fool anyone in the audience.
    • What bugs me about what the previous troper just said, is that Jake was clearly watching Tess-in-Anna the whole time she was on stage, and yet suddenly fell in love with her again even though she clearly wasn't playing the right notes and miming very badly.
    • Their full attention might not have been on Anna. She was at the left of the stage and Maddie was the singer. A lot of attention from a crowd usually goes to the singer of a band. And we know that Anna-in-Tess was playing offstage but the audience doesn't. They hear the music come on and this guitarist girl suddenly moving the guitar as if she's playing. In a venue with strobe lighting, would you really be paying that much attention to if a girl's playing looks right? And the people running the contest wouldn't have reason to think Anna was 'lip-synching'. When a singer lip-synchs, they need a backing track played over the sound system - which the sound people are supplied with. For all they know, Tess-in-Anna could have covered by saying she had trouble with her amp and got it fixed in time for her solo. There's no backing track so why should they suspect her? Tess-in-Anna realising her daughter was playing for her was really a split-second but the movie shows it a bit longer so the audience realises.
    • And Tess-in-Anna did make a good show of getting into the performance towards the end which, coupled with the apparently good playing of her guitar solo, may have redeemed her in the eyes of any skeptical audience members. People are always going to be more forgiving of a performance that starts off shaky but improves than one that starts good but gets worse.
  • We don't really know how the curse works, on a magical or scientific level, except for a few things - most importantly here, that they clearly can't access each other's memories when inside each other's heads but they do retain their own. Especially considering that Anna while possessed by Tess couldn't play guitar and Tess while possessed by Anna could, we can conclude that muscle memory is included in the memory that carries over.
• Why did Tess (in Anna's body) erase and vandalize Stacy's test? While it was pretty awesome that she did her daughter justice, it still seemed very out of character for Tess?
  • My guess? She was pushed too far and was so angry that she didn’t care.
  • Your kid and, by extension, you, have suffered at the hands of this she-demon who, honestly, had little motivation for what she was doing. Plus, if you look closely, Stacey was actually cheating off Tess-in-Anna. She had it coming.
• Was Tess's career really ruined after Anna's (in Tess's body) cringeworthy TV appearance?
  • I expect she got loads of publicity and people rushed out to buy her book. Some are shocked that this crazy on TV wrote a legitimate scientific book and are turned off. Others end up becoming fans. In the end, No Such Thing as Bad Publicity.
  • And if Tess's reputation did have any backlash because of the appearance, perhaps she could Hand Wave it as stress from her wedding being the next day, and redeem herself with the quality of her material. And if people still buy the book, she might not suffer at all.
• At the end of the movie when they switch back, why do the characters act as if everything is normal again? Do they not find it at all interesting how fortune cookies could cause them to switch bodies? Their eyes have just been opened to the existence of a whole new mysterious realm of unknown possibilities beyond anything they ever thought possible, and the owner of the local Chinese restaurant clearly knows a lot about it. Yet they aren't even interested enough to ask?
  • Some people are just so freaked out when something magic happens to them they’d rather pretend it never happened. And they clearly never want to repeat it happening again.
  • Maybe Tess and Anna did talk it over afterwards, but that would kill the flow of the ending, so all we see is the wedding and Anna's triumphant performance.
  • They probably figured that whatever mystical forces are out there, it's best not to mess with it.
• If magic exists, why use it to teach people lessons about the kind of life you live without magic, instead of leveraging it to make that kind of life unnecessary and provide much better solutions for people's problems?
  • We don't know the extent of what the fortune cookies' magic is capable of. "Make these two people swap bodies and lives until they learn to understand each other" might be the most they can do.