Le Journal de Jaimie

The Panabaker Sisters Kay and Danielle play a high school novelist and her creation. Their film Read It And Weep shows what happens when your creation starts running and ruining your life.

Kay Panabaker is a freshman in high school with all the angst therein just trying to find your place. She's really treated bad by Allison Scagliotti the head cheerleader and mean girl. Her two friends are also some oddballs played by Alexandra Krosney and Marquise Brown are artists and activists and go in for causes like saving the whales.

Kay is a writer and diarist. She's written a diary in the form of a novel with characters modeled on the people she knows in school. When it accidentally gets published Panabaker is a celebrity.

Her sister Danielle plays the diarist and heroine Isabella and she becomes alive like Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde and takes over. In fact the classic story is referenced.

The Panabaker sisters do all right in this Disney comedy. Kay gets to choose between faithful Jason Dolley and hunk Chad Broskey.

It's a Disney film, who do you think?

After reading a few messages about the book on IMDb, I knew I had to watch this. Prior to it's airing, I heard of the original title, and later had visions in my head of Danielle Panabaker dressed in a cheap superhero costume, fighting villains in the same manner as Rik Mayall's "People's Poet" from an episode of "The Young Ones," spouting out catchphrases so lame that even Archie comics wouldn't use them. Well, I was a little far from that, but still saw a fairly interesting story.

Kay Panabaker plays Jamie Bartlett, a girl struggling to survive the hierarchy of high school social life. She has three best friends, including one boy who has an obvious crush on her. Her father, ex-Even Stevens dad and legendary announcer Tom Virtue, runs a pizza parlor with her mother(Connie Young), and tries to experiment in oddball toppings. Jamie deals with the repressive tyranny of high school life by writing in a personal journal on a tablet computer, using fictional characters loosely based on the people she knows there. When she gets it mixed up with a school article for school and sends it off to be published in a school newspaper, the whole world finds out about it and her life starts to fall apart. Sounds like "Harriet the Spy," you say? Nope. Because unlike Harriet M. Welch, Jamie's private diary has an alter-ego, a semi-super-heroine named "Is," played by Kay's older sister Danielle... or at least that's what she is at first. Besides that, at first most people like her writing including her enemies.

The Great Isabella(Is) is sort of like Kim Possible with superpowers. She can do anything -- climb a rope in the gym, stroll through the halls of school zapping it's tormentors into permanent(or at least long-term) detention, get the boy of her dreams with ease, and appear only in front of Jamie. She also evolves from a heroine into a monster. Through Is, Jamie gains fortune and fame, gets her parents' pizza place some more business, gets to hang out with the school snobs who used to torment her, gets the boy of her dreams, and unfortunately nearly loses her friends, then everything else when she inadvertently reveals the inspiration for the villains in her book on a talk show. Who's going to get her out of this mess? Her parents? Her handler? Her protagonist? Her friends? The boy she loves? The boy who loves her?

Like Lizzie McGuire's Ashlie Brillault, Jamie's nemesis(Allison Scagliotti) looks much better than Jamie. Even when the trailers were shown, there's no doubting Kay's resemblance to her sister. Beyond that, she wears more make up than her older sister did in "Stuck in the Suburbs." The ending seems somewhat predictable, and unfortunately not believable. I don't think that after a Carrie-style attack on a high school dance, that the kids would be ready to get back into the music. But I suppose if you don't have incidents like these at school functions, they tend to become lame.

Some may see this as an excuse to get Danielle and Kay Panabaker to work together on the same project. That's okay by me. I saw Twitches(2005)(TV) as a lame excuse to keep the Mowry Sisters together one last time. Better DCOMs than this have existed, but this one is okay.

I was wondering if anyone knows if there was going to be a soundtrack to the new DCOM "Read it and Weep", because I love the song at the end done by Nick Whitaker, AKA Lenny, Jamie's brother. After the movie showed on Friday, I looked continuously for almost two hours and couldn't find the song anywhere. The title is "I Will Be Around". The movie also had many other great songs. I was able to find "Outside Looking In", but thats about it so far. This was one of the best Disney channel movies that has come out in a long time, and I loved it. All the cast members did a GREAT job, and I also thought it was wonderful the way they chose to have the Panabaker sisters play Jamie, and "Is". They were a great team.

When i sat down on my friend's couch with a bowl of ice cream & turned the TV on, i never expected to find a new favorite movie. Read It and Weep is, in my book, one of the finest of all DCOM movies (and lets me honest, Disney has been feeding us a lot of trash recently). i thought the plot, though predictable, was funny, honest, and amusing. it had this sweet and sour feel, like you cant decide whether you want to hug the characters or smack them. it really expressed the ups and downs of popularity and fame, as well of the hardships of high school. and nick whitaker's singing ("Lenny" was his name, in the movie) blew me away, & made me want to know if he really sings and/or plays in the real world (i would buy his album!).

If you're looking for a deep, thought-provoking, lets-ponder-the-universe type of movie, keep looking. in fact, what made you think you could find that on the Disney channel anyway?? try USA, TNT, or Court TV.

But if what you want is a fun, hilarious, quite nearly tear-jerking movie that makes your heart bubble and your sides ache, look no further.

You've found it in Read It and Weep. -Krista C.

Read It and Weep (2006) tries to package elements of 1996's "Harriet the Spy" into an episode of "Naturally Sadie" and then throws in the standard "teenage girl's upward social mobility causes her to neglect her best friends". This is one of those movies that give film producer's anxiety attacks about their job security. It not only looks good on paper (the book from which it was adapted is excellent) but it is very well executed. Good songs, Kay Panabaker has an effortless charm and does a slick voice-over narration, the acting for the camera direction is excellent (even getting a nice performance from Jason Dolley-which will strike anyone who has seen him on "Corey in the House" as quite an achievement), and the budget was large enough for professional production design.

So why is the whole less than the sum of its parts? And why did this movie fail to generate any real reaction despite an aggressive promotional campaign on the Disney Channel? My guess is that when all is said and done the thing just doesn't have any bite, having had the book's more realistic and controversial elements stripped out for the adaptation. Couple that with the fact that the movie's structure sends the wrong message; heroine Jamie Bartlett is perfectly fine with her celebrity status and unconcerned about blowing off her friends until she overreaches and her new world begins to fall apart. It is not the shallowness of her new world that she finds objectionable but the fact that she has soon alienated everyone she has been trying to impress.

Then there is fact that none (absolutely zero) of the movie's comedy elements are humorous. It's not meant to be a comedy but the producers have clearly inserted stuff (the pizza selections for example) only for their comic qualities. Unfortunately none of this stuff is even remotely funny.

Finally there is the whole imaginary alter ego thing (Kay's older sister Danielle), a character who pops in and out of countless scenes as a kind of counterpoint to the voice-over commentary. Ultimately this adds nothing to the story and the repositioning of the character with each sentence is genuinely irritating. If they had to go with this kind of thing it would have been better to have the competing angel and devil whispering in her ear. The reason being that the alter ego thing is too close to actual schizophrenia; not the mentally stable heroine role model Disney should be showcasing to an unsuspecting preteen market.

High school sophomore Jamie Bartlett (Kay Panabaker, "Phil of the Future") has three semi geek friends (who would only be geeks in a teen movie), and documents her life in a journal- the names are changed to protect the innocent. The journal is accidentally turned in as a school assignment and then published and quickly becomes a bestseller. Jamie is plunged into the life of a big-time celebrity and elevated to the top of the school's social hierarchy.

Although it should be obvious that the characters in her journal have real-life in-school counterparts, no one seems to notice or to particularly care. Then during a talk show interview Jamie slips up and reveals that the journal's villainess is based on new friend and school queen bee Sawyer Sullivan (Allison Scagliotti-Smith). Since this should have already been clear to everyone, the viewer must work to suspend disbelief as Jamie's adoring classmates turn against her for the nasty characterizations in her journal.

The DVD (and the Disney Channel broadcasts) are in 4:3. The DVD has two featurettes. "Making of Read It and Weep" (4:30) talks about making the movie. The second featurette focuses on which cast members keep journals and on the Panabaker sisters discussing their careers from the perspective of sisters.

There is also a Jordan Pruitt two-minute video of her singing "Outside Looking In". The music video interweaves various types of students taking class photos with the song about fitting in.

The "Read It and Weep" premise needs a better treatment but the movie should still be enjoyable for many in the middle school crowd; especially if they are crushing on one or more of the actors. There is little that is worth the interest and attention of younger or older viewers.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.