IHAO on ... Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

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Rotten Tomatoes - Critics 13% ; Audience 35%

Flickchart - 12394 of 28311 i.e. in the top half

IMDB - 4.5 rating

Metacritic - 33

Amazon.com - 3.0 stars

This already on paper looks better than Gigli.  Well, let's go, no time to waste.

[88 minutes later]

Hoo boy.  Well then ... plot first I suppose.

Lindsay Lohan -- NO WAIT, don't leave yet, that's not enough to write this one off -- plays a teenage drama queen, i.e. a girl who wants to be a professional actress, and one that strives on lying to be cool.  She also is super quirky, only wears ridiculous outfits no one ever owns, and is a jerk and liar at all times.  The film itself is a hyper-reality movie, which helps, but also really hurts the movie.  Anyway, she makes friends immediately after moving away from New York to her new home in New Jersey with the girl from the Newsroom because they both wear pins for the same band, Sidarthur.  Lola (Lohan's character) is madly in love with the band's lead, Stu Wolf.  Also, Megan Fox is the evil mean girl rich character.

The story revolves around two things: first, the upcoming party and concert of Sidarthur, which Lola lies about getting tickets to, and second, the upcoming performance of Liza Rocks, the drama teacher's updated version of Pygmalion, which Lola is the lead.  The biggest insult to the story is that all of the problems within the story are completely contrived and created by Lola, who is a liar or a unrepentant jerk, such as refusing free tickets to the concert and party she wanted to go to because of public perception of whatever.

STUPID!  Man, I just realized the only good movies I'm going to be able to watch all week are the little gifs of good movies I can use as reactions.  *sigh*

I don't want to talk about the plot anymore.  It is awful.  And not because of the central conceit.  This is based off a book, and it is actually a pretty interesting idea.  It took me awhile to figure it out, but this is a modernization of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."  See, the band's front man's name is Wolf!  And she lies all the time, so everyone thinks she's lying about meeting him!  There is actually something a little clever there.

But the movie does everything it can to ruin that.  Terrible acting, terrible montages, terrible songs-just-to-sell-the-soundtrack, terrible shots, terrible directing, just terrible everything.  There are so many shots that are absolutely pointless, or even worse, juvenilely done, such as a lot of TERRIBLE attempts at a shared focus shot, where you focus on the foreground and the background by compositing two shots.  It is ... ugh.

This movie isn't quite a failure.  I suspect that what its true purpose is, to share some good values about lying and to sell a soundtrack, and waste some time for some pre-teens, all that is fine and works.  It is ALMOST a failure, but ultimately, you have to reach higher than this movie aims to actually fail.

Grade: D--

• June 3^rd – Gigli (from Rachel Runion)  Grade: C
• June 4^th – Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (from Joel Gould)  Grade: D--
• June 5^th – Lenny the Wonder Dog (from Jason Schmidt)
• June 6^th – The Cat in the Hat (from Josh Hendricks)
• June 7^th – The Cat from Outer Space (from Nicole Clockel)
• June 8^th – Popeye (from Drew Turner)
• June 9^th – SURPRISE JESSEL'S ALMOST-MOST HATED MOVIE!!