She's the Man [2006]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. This week we're watching the Amanda Bynes farce "She's the Man", a teen version of Twelfth Night.

This was.... of its time. Most of the "comedy" that doesn't deal with gender [and some of it that does] is hack in the same way as a Disney Channel original. It could be worse. It could have Dane Cook in it. Or Ryan Reynolds. Or Paris Hilton. The 2000s were extremely cursed, in retrospect.

There's a couple solid performances in this. Bynes carries the movie surprisingly well, despite a... tortured vocal performance in like 60% of the scenes where she's trying to sound extra masculine. An early form of Tatum's comedic chops are on display. David Cross is in full Tobias Funke mode.

There was some fun production design to this.

The dream sequence is full of big, fun choices. And a lot of the sports-action scenes are indebted to 2001's Shaolin Soccer, they're quite extrareal.

The hair feels like predictive programming for Bieber, which is weird since it's two years early. I guess it was also just sort of the style at the time, judging by Chris Lowell's hair in Veronica Mars.

Speaking as someone who was a teen at the time, I think this does a better job of navigating the everyday performance of gender than its peer films of that era; American Pie, Van Wilder, Wedding Crashers, Shallow Hal. It's a low bar and, again, it was a cursed time. Like it acknowledges men have feelings and women have ambitions and plays with the performance and pitfalls of exaggerated masculinity and femininity, and lets those norms strangle each-other until the humor falls out.

I probably won't watch this again, but I'm not flatly opposed to watching this again like I am about the 1996 Twelfth Night. or the 1993 Much Ado About Nothing. or China Girl. or McLintock. or anything starring Charlton Heston. It's a 100 minute comedy, it was fun, and frankly, not that deep.

Thank you for joining me for My Year of Shakespeare. Next week, we're changing gears to talk A Midsummer Nights Dream with Get Over It (2001) and Strange Magic (2015). A twofer.