Shine Bright, Shine Far: The "Life-Size" Sequel We Never Knew We Needed

By Spencer Coile 

Let's journey back to 2000: Tyra Banks and Lindsay Lohan lit up the screen in the Disney Channel Original Film, Life-Size. Banks played Eve, the infamous (not to mention, ficitonal) doll who comes to life to help Casey (Lindsay Lohan) cope with the loss of her mother. In true Disney fashion, the film included zany outfits, the occasional musical number, and of course--picked up a cult following of die-hard tween fans. But for those who thought the story ended 17 years ago, think again. Freeform, the sister studio to Disney Channel, has greenlit Life-Size 2, which is expected to make its television debut in December of 2018 as a part of the studio's "25 Days of Christmas" month. 

Although the film will bring back Banks to play Eve and will supposedly be a modern-day Christmas tale, very little is known about this upcoming project. Namely, if Lindsay Lohan will return. Odds are unlikely, but die-hard fans can dream about this reunion in the meantime. Still, I cannot contain my excitement, and I hope I'm not alone. What say you, Life-Size fans? Do we need a sequel? Or for those who haven't seen the first film, are you left with a general feeling of "huh?" 

Tweetweek: ABBA in a White Room, Carrie Gifs, 1999 Supporting Actress

In today's tweetweek, the 1999 supporting actress race, mindy project A+ joke, ABBA, Lindsay Lohan's new accent, and the last few days of political anxiety (in this phase at least). It's all after the jump...

For Toni Collette's birthday, I broke into Angelina Jolie's home and retrieved her Supporting Actress Oscar. It's the very least I could do.

— Matthew Eng (@Eng_Matthew) November 1, 2016

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From the Vaults: Meryl Streep in "A Prairie Home Companion"

Since today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Robert Altman's swan song A Prairie Home Companion (2006), a gem excavated from that year's Oscar blogging for those who were not around in 2006. Though I know I've cooled on Meryl in the years since I wrote this (2006 was a major peak for Meryl but too many performances that didn't thrill followed and were automatically exalted and Oscar nominated anyway) I consider her past decade a valley rather than a downward trend. All performers have their peaks and valleys. I'm waiting for the next transcendent performance -- Impatiently, but I promise I'm hopeful.

It didn't take Meryl Streep long. By 1987 at the very latest, just ten years into her career, we knew that she could do everything. We'd already heard the accents, seen the funny, witnessed the sexy, fallen in love, had our hearts broken and heard the magnificent singing voice. If she were less endearing and emotionally attentive as a performer her technical range would be just hateful, a thing to curse as she popped up again and again in films. But this woman has it all. She is, put simply, the most consistent versatile actor in the movies.

So what is there left for Meryl Streep to do? It turns out quite a lot...

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What could have been...

This Michael Thompson photo was taken ten years ago for W Magazine's May 2006 issue.

"I know what you're thinking: Home schooled kids are freaks!"

[Our Mean Girls week concludes with a really fresh angle I think you'll love. Here's Tim on being a home schooled freak. - Nathaniel R]

Tim here. I can't tell you how many times I, a perpetually overweight, underemployed, thirtysomething male, have looked at Lindsay Lohan and thought to myself gosh, she's just like me! But I can tell you the time it struck closest to home was when I first peered into Mean Girls a decade ago. Look at any appreciation, vintage or current, like the ones we have going for our Mean Girls Week, and you're going to encounter the sentiment that the film understands deep and universal truths about the public high school experience, but the kinship I feel with Lohan's Cady Heron is of an entirely different sort - the exact opposite, in fact.

Mean Girls, after all, isn't just a movie about any old bright teenager entering a new school and being partially devoured by the social order she finds there: it's about a bright teenager who has spent her life to that point being home schooled, thrust for the first time into a world full of people her own age. And like Cady, I spent my share of time being home schooled, though it wasn't because my parents were awesome zoologists who took me with them for a decade-plus research trip in Africa (it wasn't for fringe religious reasons either, I want to make that very clear). And unlike Cady, I never did get to experience the magical horror show of American high school. But I did get to have that same brutal, abrupt shift from being essentially solitary, driven only by my own sense of discipline, to be thrown into a terrifying world of people and schedules when college and dorms came upon me. [More...]

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