Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004)

If you like cheesy girly movies then you may enjoy this one. A bit over the top with fantasy clips which I wasn't much of a fan of but some were alright. I hated being able to notice there was screens behind them at times. I was impressed by Lindsay's singing and dancing. I feel sad seeing her in her youth as well as Amanda Bynes whom I had loved. It's a shame what has become of them. On an interesting note for me was I wasn't sure if I had watched it before. Even watching it I kept questioning myself. I have seen it before but sadly it was clearly not that memorable. It was really just an alright movie. Certainly not a gotta watch before you die one. Lol

Kids want more!Lindsay Lohan has major media attention, without being real star material. She'd make a sidekick, sure, but lead girl? I've seen her in both MEAN GIRLS where she was outclassed by Rachel McAdams all the way, and GEORGIA RULES, where the actress playing her mother, Felicity Huffman, stole the show, for freaking crying shame! Hot teen foxes MUST do better, Lindsay-love.In this movie, the brighter star is relegated to playing the bad girl. Megan Fox could blow Lindsay Lohan out of the water at any time, but she had to sit on the sideline portraying a cardboard bad girl, Carla Santini. Megan, in this negative part, as the unlikeable rival, nevertheless managed to attract more attention and made Lindsay seem bland by comparison. And as for Alison Pill, that one barely scrapes by. I do not see what the fuss about Lindsay Lohan really is about. I saw amongst the trivia that the part was originally offered to Hilary Duff. That one's cute, she would have made a much better lead actress, with Lindsay in the supporting Ella role. But I suppose Hilary was off on a rock tour.Movie itself is kinda drab and one big yawn and Walt Disney is really in the doldrums judging by the junk they advertise on the DVD which does succeed to make CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE DRANA QUEEN look like a sparkling Ferris wheel. Okay, so I am an old guy and this stuff is marketed at kids but this is the Twenty-First Century so Disney wake up! The kids are advanced and they move past these milk-teeth fodder long before they're out of nappies, dummies and prams. Kids want more!As for this movie, the entire theme is a storm in a teacup, high school play, gmf! That is of course not the point, because for a high-school girl these things would be, like, super-super- important, but the movie is kind of a storm in a teacup itself. As the opposition is such a one-sided badly scripted character, it's not if there ever was much challenge. So the victory is that less sweet. There is no real crisis, other than that the kids think Lola is a fake. The script needed more Z I N G and both Megan and Lindsay could easily have upped it a whole buncha notches while still staying in the Disney all-ages fun-for-the-whole-family realm.

I have seen what hell is like, and it's watching this movie. Lindsay Lohan plays Mary. (She calls herself Lola.) Mary is an extreme drama queen. So she is crushed when her Mom moves her from New York City to a suburb. She spends the entire movie trying to compete with mean girl, Carla. First, Mary tries out for the school play and then she tries to get into the final concert of everyone's favorite band, Sidarthur. In the end, Mary gets everything she wants because she is the so-called "protagonist" of the movie. Lohan plays this part amazingly well, mostly because Lohan is a drama-driven slut in real life. That's just my opinion, but I know that a lot of people agree with me. Mary is just about as horrible a role model for young girls as there is. Just as bad as a lot of mean girl antagonists like Carla or Sharpay from High School Musical, if not worse, a lot worse. This is a very bad movie to show your daughters because it gives them horrible impressions about appropriate behavior for girls and it teaches them completely horrendous values about life and getting what you want. Overall, this is the worst family film I have seen in my life.

The central character of this film is Mary Cep (who prefers to be called Lola), a New York schoolgirl who is horrified when her mother decides to move the family to the New Jersey suburbs. (I wonder if the choice of the name "Lola" was inspired by Lindsay Lohan's own "Li-Lo" nickname). For Lola her native city is the cultural centre of the universe, and New Jersey is spiritually dead. To make things worse, the rather Bohemian Cep family are not made particularly welcome by their staid and conventional new neighbours, who disapprove of their lifestyle and of the fact that Lola's mother is a divorcée. (This detail did not really ring true. Surely these days divorce is nearly as common in conservative suburbia as it is among the artistic intelligentsia).The film is a standard high school comedy, with three main strands to the plot. One deals with Lola's attempts to attend a rock concert with her strait-laced friend Ella and to meet her favourite rock star, Stu Wolfe. Another deals with the staging of a school musical based upon Shaw's "Pygmalion", in which Lola takes the role of Eliza. (This is not Lerner and Loewe's "My Fair Lady" but a rock version which transfers the action to modern-day New York). The third deals with Lola's romance with a handsome boy named Sam. A theme running throughout is the rivalry between Lola and Carla Santini, the beautiful but snobbish and bitchy daughter of a wealthy lawyer. (The glamorous class bitch is a recurrent character in high school dramas).There are some similarities with "Get Over It", another film set around the staging of a high school musical. (I must admit that I have never seen either of the "High School Musical" films themselves). The main difference is that "Get Over It" is a romantic comedy, which just happens to be set in a high school, and in which the male characters are as important as the female ones, whereas "Confessions…." is a high school comedy which just happens to feature romance as one of its elements, and not the most important element at that. (The Sam sub-plot occupies considerably less time than the other two, and the emphasis is very much on the female characters rather than the male ones).Until I saw this film recently I was only aware of Lindsay Lohan as a name in the gossip columns, the latest official Drama Queen of American showbiz, rather than as an actress. The meaning of the title in the context of the film is that Lola is a "drama queen" in two senses, in the sense that she is an aspiring actress but also in the sense that she is the sort of person who will make a huge emotional drama out of just about every development in her life, but in the light of recent revelations about Lindsay's personal life it seems unfortunately appropriate to her as well.To be fair to Lindsay, however, the film shows just why she was regarded in 2004 as having enormous potential to become a major star. The freckle-faced redhead is not, perhaps, a classical beauty (the real beauty in this film is the appropriately-surnamed Megan Fox, who plays the obnoxious Carla), but she has plenty of personality and charisma, and makes Lola, for all her faults, into a lovable heroine. "Confessions….." is a fairly trivial and lightweight, if inoffensive, comedy, but the sparkle and energy of Miss Lohan's performance transform it into something watchable, even to those of us who are not teenage girls. 6/10