Three years ago, my fiance and I were winding through the narrow streets of Seville when he began a sentence with the words: “Imagine if.” Imagine if, he pondered, you went to a foreign country and it turned out that you looked exactly like one of their local celebs. People would approach you for autographs … they would scream at you on the street … you wouldn’t know what was going on. I stopped still and gawped at him. “That’s the plot of The Lizzie McGuire Movie,” I said. And that’s when I found out that the man I was going to marry had never seen the greatest film of all time.
Movies with the word “movie” in the title are not usually considered the world’s best and yes, officially The Lizzie McGuire Movie is a flop, with a 41% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But the coming-of-age comedy was released in 2003, at a time when critics were allowed to hate teenage girls a little more openly than they’re allowed to hate teenage girls today. That might be “irrelevant” because the “experts” were “technically correct” in noting that the movie is not a masterpiece, but I believe it is at least a masterpiece of the genre. By which I mean: at one point, an Italian woman manhandles Hilary Duff before handing her a giant wheel of cheese.
