Tonight, Tyra's seventeenth cycle of America's Next Top Model, the All-Star cycle, premieres on the CW. In this cycle, Tyra will coach her all-stars not only how to model, but how to turn themselves into personal "brands," which includes acting, singing and more. And so it seems all too fitting that today, we look back at a special part of Tyra's journey to becoming a "brand": Playing an actual piece of merchandise in the 2001 Lindsay Lohan vehicle Life-Size.

Life-Size premiered as a made-for-TV movie on The Disney Channel ten years ago. It stars a young, post-Parent Trap Lindsay Lohan as a naive tomboy who tries to use dark magic to bring back her dead mom, and a youngish, pre-America's Next Top Model Tyra Banks as a brainless Barbie doll brought to life by that magic. It is a pinnacle of modern cinema...'s assumption that children are idiots, from its preposterous concept to its corny dialogue to its questionable lessons about friendship, stardom and sorcery. It is also full of Tyra faces, fashions and acting fails. Life-Size should and shall never be forgotten. I know that, the angel who put the entire film on YouTube knows that (watch and follow along!) and now you too will know that. Here we go.




Cut to the local middle school football game, where young Lindsay is playing QB (lol, right) but her dumb, idiot pre-pubescent receiver, played by some Devon Sawa-nnabe, misses the ball and loses the game for EVERYONE. Lindsay is full of angst. She hates Sawa-nnabe, she hates dolls, she hates her coach and she hates THE WORLD!


The angst turns into silent depression when she notices that her dad's massive, pubic goatee is missing from the stands. Her dad, "Ben," is busy at work flirting with his new assistant, who thinks "being a great dad" is sexy and that sending a "birthday kiss" to her boss's daughter is a normal thing to do. She's obviously here because of some special needs adult work program. She also wants to get with Ben. We can tell by the way her lilac suit's shoulder pads quiver when he's near. When the assistant leaves, Ben's lawyer friend tells him to hit it, but Ben's sad eyes tell us that he only wants to hit it with his dead wife. "MOVE ON!" the friend says, because Ben's wife died what, six months ago? Get over it, Ben. Tell your sad eyes everyone's tired of your "mourning."

Back at home, Lil' Li-Lo resurrects a dinosaur in the shape of a desktop PC so she can Ask Jeeves how to resurrect her dead mom. The movie really dates itself when she finds a website that tells her she'll find the answer she seeks ... IN A BOOK IN THE LOCAL LIBRARY.


Ben comes home and they get in a fight about how Ben really needs to "make partner at the firm" (one of my favorite movie lies that no one in real life EVER says!) and that's why he missed her game. Lindsay goes to bed and marvels at how having a Stupid Ben and a Dead Mom is even worse than having a Michael and Dina Lohan. Nothing is impossible!

The next day, Lindsay Lohan's bitchy little bitch friends complain that ever since her mom died, she's "totally ignored" them. "Yeah, like, get over it already," one of these pre-pubescent urchins spits outs. They ask her red and beige fishing hat why it's been ignoring them, and Lindsay's hat is like, "There's more to life than just shopping, fellow ten-year-old using her allowance money on slap bracelets." Then, in a psychic homage to her future self, baby Lindsay immediately goes shop-lifting... for KNOWLEDGE! She goes to the book store and decides to steal the Necronomicon, because it costs 150 big ones and what is she, a chump? She's just a child who wants to bring her dead mom back to life, and this book is the only logical conclusion to that problem.


(Maybe that necklace that real life adult Lindsay stole also had magical powers? Did you ever think of THAT, the prosecution? The defense RESTS!) Baby Lindsay leaves an "IOU" as her calling card. "Oh, great, I'll never see HER again," says the bookstore owner about a ten-year-old who just stole a book about dark magic. It's unclear whether he means that she will soon be dead after exposure to all those evil spells, but he seems unconcerned either way.

Before she can make a zombie-mom, Lindsay has to eat her birthday cake with dumb ol' dad, who reminds her that the cake is her favorite, "Double chocolate. Chocolate on the inside and chocolate on the outside." (Foreshadowing that soon she will have a chocolate goddess as her new best friend?) "DON'T TELL ME WHAT I LIKE AND DON'T LIKE, DAD!" says Lindsay's gross chunky wristwatch. Her mouth is full of cake and sadness: "I wish that mom could come back." This starts a fight about her child psychologist's bad breath and whether magic exists. Ben distracts Li-Lo from the fight by bribing her with NFL tickets because he's #1 Dad. The ghost of Lindsay's dead mom tells her to never give up on her dream. Just then, the doorbell rings. Hey, look who it is!


It's Ben's slutty assistant, who stopped by instead of calling on the phone like an actual human would. She wants Ben to "review her draft." What a disgusting euphemism, slutty assistant.

Slutsistant waltzes in like she owns the place and gives Lindsay a birthday present because she "couldn't resist" (my ardent desire to bone your dad). Hey, look, we finally got to the point of the movie: THE GIFT IS AN EVE DOLL! Now this plot is really rolling, and all it took was a grossly presumptuous and inappropriate gift from a tertiary no-name character who barely knows this butch little ginger girl and has no sense of human boundaries.

SPEAKING OF: Lindsay goes upstairs and prepares her "altar" to resurrect her mom, which means putting a seashell on her dresser. Uh oh, what if she accidentally brings a hermit crab back to life? Then she gets out her mom's hairbrush (while whispering "mom's brush") and asks her mom to "be there for her one more time" (as a zombie). She's about to say the "incantation" when Slut-sistant barges in to say goodnight (convince a child to put in a good word with Dad so she can do sex with him at an indeterminate point in the future).

"Oh, look at all the trophies you have!" this insufferable woman, let's call her SHARON, says as she knocks down the entire upper shelf like her arms are made of wood and glued together with overstaying one's welcome. Lindsay runs out of the room with all her Wiccan props, and that's when Sharon finds the Eve doll, whose hair's integrity is the one casualty of Hurricane Sharon. "Oh, look at you," the adult human woman says to the fake, non-living doll. She brushes the doll's hair with the dead mom's brush, like that's a thing you would do to someone else's doll in someone else's room with someone else's hairbrush.


Sharon props Eve up on her display stand and then decides where to put it: On the child's nightstand. This woman is a creep and I want her arrested.

After Sharon goes back to her alien pod, Lindsay FINALLY gets to do her spell, which goes like this: "Zamba tarka ishtu neboreen!" Seriously. Completely loyal phonetic transcription right there. Very legit, very magic-sounding. She repeats it about eight or a hundred times, and the book starts to glow, and so does the Eve doll. Something's happeninggggggg!

 

Which means it's time to go to bed! Cut to the next morning: Lindsay is asleep, yet still mumbling the incantation (what do you mean that's impossible?), and next to her is ... TYRAAAAAAAAAAAA!


Tyra is wearing a three-piece, mid-riff-bearing orange velour suit. It is glorious. Just like her face.


The next day at football practice, Lindsay acts out by calling another kid a "weiner head" (LOL, good one!) and gets benched. Then she and Eve have the dumbest conversation in the history of fake dumb conversations:

Eve: Last night you had water in your eyes. It ran down your cheeks.
Baby Lindsay Lohan: It's called crying. You really don't get it, do you? When people get sad it makes tears in their eyes.
Eve: Where do the tears come from?
BLL [points to throat]: In here. (She means her chest/heart.)

Eve and Lindsay bond over how her dead mom got dead, and how hard and uncertain and ultimately futile it is to be human because sadness and death are inevitable. For a minute. THEN THEY GO HOME AND BURN DOWN THE HOUSE!


Eve cries about how she can't do anything right and she "needs [her] fun and splash hot tub." She truly is the pinnacle of modern womanhood. After a shower and before a tickle fight, Lindsay teaches Eve that to be a role model she doesn't have to be perfect all the time, and Eve teaches Lindsay that she needs to break down her walls and let people in. SHE'S TEN! But she's pretty cool. I mean, check out how she gets her email:


Later, Eve sees a TV news report about how her line of dolls might get canceled forever. Feel that heat under your collar? That's the stakes a-RISIN'!

The next day, it's time for Lindsay's championship football game, but her helmet is depressed because Dad's goatee isn't in the stands. It's back at work, waiting for The Big Partner Meeting to start. In a moment of clarity, Ben decides to ditch his deposition and go to the game, because Eve taught him what it means to be a real star, and that's being a great dad! Ben gets to the game just in time to see Casey get sacked. HARD. But he shakes his fists at her, lovingly, and that's when the REAL magic begins. The magic of love conquering all!

Meanwhile, Eve is downtown at the toy store, visiting her own final clearance sale. It's like a toy's version of "This is Your Life."


The woman in the toy store recognizes Eve, because why else would a beautiful, tall black woman be in this tiny podunk town? She must be the living incarnation of a plastic doll. The toy store woman has so many questions! What happened? Where did she come from? How does she pee? But Eve rushes off before Toy Store Lady can get answers.

Eve makes it to the end of the football game, just in time to watch Lindsay and Weiner Head make the perfect play to win the game! ... SIKE.


Weiner Head carries Casey's perfect pass an inch to the goal line, then falls and time runs out. Her team loses the game! (Life Lesson Six of Life-Size: Boys don't make passes at girls who can't turn their passes into touchdowns.) Whoa, did M. Night Shyamalan direct this? Because that was a TWIST!

Ben apologizes to Casey for not being a good dad and says her dead Mom would be mighty proud of that pass. Eve watches from the sidelines, and look at that: There's water coming out of her eyes/heart. She touches her eyeball to make sure.

Yep, she's a REAL GIRL NOW! Eve looks around at all the real families feeling real feelings around her, and disappears. Casey asks a stranger where Eve went, and the stranger tells Casey calmly, "Oh, that nice looking woman? She just left. She said she found a book, got someone to read it to her, and she's heading home." What a ludicrous sentence for a human being to say! But whatever, this movie left Logic Town the minute it took its first step. Casey drags Ben away from the field saying, "There's no time to explain! Eve's about to have a meltdown!" Whatever that means. Casey clearly understands more about this world than I do.

Eve arrives at Eve Doll Headquarters or something. She walks down a long hallway decorated with photos of her doll-self, and then walks into a big studio set up like a playtime theater. OR A TALK SHOW.

Eve slowly surveys her kingdom: There's her dreamhouse, her red corvette, the mall, her servants' quarters and decides that it's time to go home. She looks at the ceiling and whispers, "Sun of suns, moon of moons, once awakened, now to return." She wants to be a doll again, where everything is easy and nothing hurts. Because if you're all the way plastic, you don't have a brain, and if you don't have a brain, you can't feel sad. It's the same reason pretty girls grow up to be Playboy Bunnies and pretty boys grow up to be Ryan Seacrests.

Casey and Ben show up, and the security guard tells them he thought Eve was "the woman from the photo shoots" and he sent her down the hall to pick up her last paychecks. If it weren't on Disney, this movie COULD take an awesome/sinister turn right there: What if Eve is actually just a model who had a nervous breakdown and now believes she is the doll she's been modeling for? And so she goes around to young girls' houses, tricking them into believing she's the doll come to life so they'll be her best friend and she can MURDER/STEAL them? Now that would be a great twist.

Instead, it's just an excuse for how Eve got into the building, and Eve really is the doll come to life. Casey and Ben make it to the talk show room just in time to say goodbye. She's still a human, but "the spell is complete" and Eve is "going home," where they apparently need her spirit/essence so the doll line won't get canceled. Don't think too hard about it. Eve tells a crying Casey that she loves her. "I can go back now, and everything you've taught me will be a part of ALL the dolls," Eve says. Uhhh, like football? Or like magically resurrecting your dead mom? Oh, she means like crying and friendship.


Casey and Ben watch as Eve gets consumed by a swirl of twinklies, glitterbugs and sweetie pies. She becomes the doll once more. Ben grabs the doll and says, "How 'bout we put her somewhere special?" GROSS, BEN. She was, like, just a person and now you want to use her as your sex toy? Get help.

Epilogue: While walking downtown, Ben and Casey see that the Eve dolls are flying off the shelves at the toy shore now. Then Casey runs into her old friends and ditches dumb ol' Dad to hang out with them. Sharon runs into Ben, calls him "partner" and offers to take him to lunch. They're going to get married, probably. Down the street, a little girl hugs her Eve doll, who has bangs now and says, "Show me your million watt smile!" The movie ends with an unnecessary encore performance of "Be A Star" with Tyra as the lead singer.


And they all lived happily ever after, except for Eve because she's not real and never was, except in Casey's young grief-stricken imagination. THE END!