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Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
2004 - PG - 96 Mins.
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| Director: Sara Sugarman | | Producer: Jerry Leider, Robert Shapiro | | Written By: Gail Parent | | Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, Alison Pil, Carol Kane, Adam Garcia |
| Review by: Joe Rickey |
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One really bad hair day.
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Lindsay Lohan has shown in the past that she has talent. From innocent fun of ‘The Parent Trap’ to the slightly edgier but still Disney-approved fun of the great ‘Freaky Friday’ remake, Lohan has consistently shown herself to be a more than capable comedic performer. It’s too bad then that she took the lead role in ‘Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen,’ an insanely inept pile of drivel aimed squarely at the pre-teen girls that Disney hopes will make Lohan and fellow Disney-groomed Hillary Duff, superstars in both film and music.
The film concerns a girl named Lola (Lohan). She is a girl of comfort. She loves her current situation as the proverbial queen of her New York City high school. She has her many followers and, of course, her many detractors; enemies she has ably handled all in the spirit of becoming the most popular girl in school. After all, popularity is the most important facet of high school life. Who needs an education? School is more about being known and well liked than learning about 18th century Europe or World War II. Lola knows this better than anyone and she has dedicated her high school life to gaining a following and achieving high status among (most) of her peers. So imagine her anger when she finds out that her family is moving from the confines of New York City to New Jersey. Ugh! Lola just won’t have it! There is no way she is going to throw all of her hard work away just to please her family. She is going to fight it. She does so but fails. Now she must start at a new school with no friends and she complains that she has forgotten how to even make friends in the first place. She also feels that the process is going to be made more difficult because she is used to life in the big city; she doesn’t know if she can adjust to life in the “country.” We all know that New Jersey is commonly referred to as the country. Thus the adventures of a teenage drama queen begin as she tries out in a school musical in order to hopefully gain stature in her new surroundings.
‘Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen’ is a terrible attempt at a family comedy/teen comedy mix. It has the PG rating all family comedies need to even gain that title, and it has the intensely artificial subplots common to most of today’s mass-produced teen comedies. Mixing the two styles just does not work. The film is poorly written for one. It is soft and outright gooey/cheesy at times when it desperately calls for more bite and an infinitely sharper wit than is on display. It would have worked better as a sort of dark comedy/satire in the vein of ‘Heathers’ on the subject of popularity. That is not to be, since Disney is behind it and hoped that it would become a huge hit and lead the way for Lohan to become a star. That too, is not to be as the film didn’t exactly perform up to hit status with a little over twenty million made theatrically.
Lohan does her best with what she is given but that’s not nearly enough to salvage this wreck of a film.
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