Word: duff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Muniz may be thought of as just another cute, cunning face, smiling from inside your living-room furniture. Duff and Bynes may be familiar to everyone under 14 and nobody over. (Bynes' appeal was so dense and narrow that MTV bookers thought she was a little kid when her publicists approached them last month.) But these teens don't see TV as the apogee of their career arc. They want to be movie stars. And now Hollywood wants that...
...packaging 10- to 15-year-olds for their own TV shows, then rewrapping them for the big screen. Muniz, even as he girds for his fifth season as Malcolm, is so much a fixture in theatrical films that a Cody Banks sequel is already in the works. Bynes and Duff, the twin Tweens' Queens of kid TV, aim to become Hollywood movie princesses...
Some of the teen TV shows and films are throwbacks to classic (i.e., old) Hollywood fodder. Lizzie McGuire, a genteel sitcom about a middle schooler, her parents and school friends, provides cheerful role models and helpful homilies. Dissing gets scrubbed into snappy patter, dysfunction into amiable eccentricity. And Duff makes the medicine go down with spoonfuls of beguilement. A budding beauty with good comic timing and the sense not to hit her emotions on the nose, she almost turns Lizzie into a striver. "She doesn't exactly fit in at school," Duff says. "Even though she's cool...
...older, with more roughhouse and cynicism, but Muniz's feature films are traditional anxiety fantasies for kids: Big Fat Liar put some brisk wit into its boy-who-cried-wolf plot; Cody Banks is a wan recycling of Spy Kids with a 007 fixation. The Bynes and Duff movie vehicles are more nakedly retro. What a Girl Wants is based on the '50s Sandra Dee bauble The Reluctant Debutante, while The Lizzie McGuire Movie could be Gidget Goes to Rome with an updated pop score. Both put their budding stars in glamorous foreign capitals (London and Rome), where they addle...
...actors, like baby Tiger Woodses and Michelle Kwans, have been doing what they're good at since early kidhood. Muniz was a trouper at 8, as Tiny Tim in a Christmas Carol in Raleigh, N.C. Bynes was discovered at 10 at a kids' stand-up workshop in Los Angeles. Duff loved playacting in her Houston home: "When I was a kid, I would turn the TV off and act out the scenes myself." At 7, she turned...