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Twenty years ago, Hilary Duff cemented her status as a Disney Channel icon by starring in the first-ever Disney series movie spin-off released in theaters: “The Lizzie McGuire Movie.” As in the show, Duff played the perpetually lip-glossed, glossy-haired middle-school outcast, Lizzie McGuire, who manages to get bullied by being nicer and conventionally hotter than anyone you went to junior high with. The concept of the movie: Lizzie heads to Rome for a post-graduation class trip, only to catch the eye of an Italian teen heartthrob named Paolo and get swept into impersonating his ex-partner, Isabella, at a music video awards show. It’s millennial tween girl wish-fulfillment to the max, from Lizzie’s effortlessly stick-straight blonde hair and pinstriped flared low-rise jeans to her sudden ascension into pop stardom. And it should not be surprising that, as adult viewers, we found this classic tween flick to be rife with plot holes, bad accent work, and glib references to no-carb diets. How did we ever make it through middle school in the early aughts? This movie only offers more questions.
But while “Lizzie McGuire” didn’t exactly inspire us with its artistry, there’s just something about a nostalgic rewatch of a movie that brought you joy as an adolescent — or even one that captures a time when you were young and corny enough to enjoy bad movies about middle-schoolers meeting cute guys in European cities. If you haven’t been listening to our “Bachelor” off-season pods on “Love to See It,” we’ve been rewatching teen romances that shaped our own youthful beliefs about love, ambition, feminism and finding ourselves: “Love and Basketball,” “10 Things I Hate About You,” “Easy A,” and many more to come. And honestly? Most of them actually do hold up.
Here on Rich Text, we’re doing it with a twist: instead of Very Important Teen Rom-Coms, we’re recapping a Very Bad Tween (Rom?) Com. Joining us for this rewatch was the wonderful Laura Hankin, our old friend and author of “The Daydreams” (out tomorrow!), a novel about four friends who starred on a Disney-esque teen show in the early aughts — and whose lives spun off in wildly different directions after a live episode went catastrophically awry and brought down the entire series. Now adults, the four cast members are brought back together for a reunion show, where old wounds are reopened, old secrets come to light, and old hopes are rekindled. It’s truly the satisfying version of rewatching “Lizzie McGuire” as a grown-up, with all the heady 2000s nostalgia plus the added depth of adult perspective.
So please, check out Laura’s delightful book, dig into our teen rom-com rewatch miniseries over at LTSI, and enjoy this tween rom-com rewatch — as a special treat, we’ve made it free!
And stay tuned, because we’ve got a lot of great pods coming this month for paid subscribers, including a pre-VPR finale Scandoval explainer, a “Selling Sunset” season 6 recap, and a “Yellowjackets” season 2 discussion!
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Does 'The Lizzie McGuire Movie' Hold Up?