Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen Movie Review:


Could anyone actually enjoy a movie like “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen”? It's about a self-absorbed high school girl who moves from New York to New Jersey and finds herself having to re-establish her status as a popular personality. That's a curious start, but the movie soon reveals itself to be interested in little more than being bright, shiny, and cute, content to populate itself with character types instead of real characters. Trying to feel better about itself, the film half-heartedly includes a moral. In the meantime, it functions mainly as a talent vehicle for its singing, dancing, acting star --Lindsay Lohan.

The movie's high school environment feels plastic and manufactured. Its plot, which involves competing for the lead in a school play and sneaking into rock concerts, is sitcom-trivial. Its situations and humor are banal, unless you've never seen a comedic drunk routine or various showdowns of attitude between a leading girl and her snooty antagonist (Megan Fox, whose arrival is ALWAYS heralded on the soundtrack by the "uh-ohs" of Lumidee's "Never Leave You") or scenes where someone breaks into a room to steal something while another person tries unsuccessfully to slow down and distract the incoming authority figure. So I ask: what teenage girl would enjoy watching this? I'm glad Disney addresses this oft-ignored movie-watching demographic, but if these girls are pandered to so obviously, won't they feel insulted?

Perhaps the younger teens and pre-teen girls won't be as critical -- the flick feels much more geared to appeal to that age group. Even so, aren't the filmmakers shooting themselves in the foot by making the protagonist a semi-likeable liar (for starters, her real name is Mary but she rather annoyingly insists on being called "Lola")? There's no winning scenario here. If girls are put off by the main character's self-centeredness, they're not going to be able to sympathize. If girls see themselves in Lola, they might find their drama queen tendencies encouraged. And the supposed lesson of seeing themselves in Lola, they might find their drama queen tendencies encouraged. And the supposed lesson of the movie -- it's better not to be a self-absorbed drama queen who lies -- will be lost by the ending, which sees our heroine getting everything she was going for in the first place.

As a result, “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen” is instantly forgettable because its audience has no reason to invest in the movie. The major problem? It's not being sold to teenagers, but pushed at them. Lola has a poor moral base and is meant to learn something, so she is presented as an example, rather than someone to identify with. She's surrounded by a sparkling shininess that, although eye-pleasing, makes nothing feel real, and that only makes her world more distant. The movie would like to play up its fantasy aspects, but even here it can't get things right because they appear and disappear without any consistency -- Lohan dressed up as Marilyn Monroe in a daydream might be cute, for instance, but it comes up in the middle of nowhere and serves no purpose other than an opportunity for Lohan to play dress-up. These silly elements occasionally leak into the "real" world, such as in a scene where the good girl and bad girl race down the school halls dodging obstacles in exaggerated ways, but since they don't happen often enough, they just feel out of place.

Somewhere close to the end, something happened that almost caused me to believe Lola was deluded and had imagined everything. As it turns out, that wasn't the case (merely bad scripting), but I feel the movie might have made itself more interesting by using the alternate reality plot device, no matter how stale it's become. My own way of making the movie more interesting was to think of it as a metaphor for Lohan's supposed real-life feud with competing teen Hilary Duff, another popular singer, dancer, actress. See, it kind of works, because the good girl and bad girl are both spotlight-seekers, and they are taught that having petty differences is bad. Oh well, whatever. If one has to do that much work to make an unenjoyable movie better, it's not really worth it -- for teenage girls or anyone else.

Jeffrey Chen

An energetic cast and random lines of snappy dialog almost elevate this insipid comedy into something entertaining. But not quite. The title refers to Lola (Lohan), a larger-than-life teen whose entire world crumbles when her mother (Headly) does the unthinkable and moves the family from Manhattan to New Jersey. Lola's thrift-shop wackiness is a bit unsettling in her new suburban high school, but she quickly becomes fast friends with the smart but slightly nerdy Ella (Pill) and Sam (Marienthal), while just as quickly discovering her nemesis in the popular, rich Carla (Fox). This rivalry isn't helped when Lola lands the lead role in Eliza Rocks, the eccentric drama teacher's (Kane) new musical version of Pygmalion.

There's a decent script in here, and the cast infuses it with enthusiastically offbeat touches, but director Sugarman can't resist making it even zanier with fantasy sequences and editing flourishes. She then adds so many Important Life Lessons that it gets truly unbearable--trite messages about friendship and loyalty, the falseness of celebrity, the danger of telling little white lies, the courage to be yourself--right to the point where Lola actually says, "Here's what I learned"! Sugarman condescends so badly to her audience that nothing will speak to anyone over about age 5. It certainly never remotely touches the realities of teen life on anything beyond the most superficially silly level.

In addition, the adult characters are so badly whittled down that there's virtually nothing left. Kane is the only one who registers, mostly due to her wondrously deranged performance and her over-the-top costumes and make-up. Headly on the other hand is barely here at all; and Garcia's dreamboat rock star--Jim Morrison meets Steven Tyler--never has a chance to make much sense. Fortunately, Lohan is such a glittering presence at the film's centre that we can't help but love her. She and Pill dive into every scene, and Lohan shines in the musical numbers, especially during the otherwise cliched final sequence. Lindsay rocks!

Rich Cline

Site Contents Copyright© The Z Review, unless used with permission.This site has no intention to infringe on the rights of the film owners of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and intellectual copyright holders of the movies mentioned herein & hold copyright over the movie, characters, merchandise & storyline.