Confessions of a bad teen movie

A good teen movie is a rare and much sought-after commodity. And it shouldn't take much, really, just a beautiful, lovable protagonist (Lindsay Lohan), a cute guy, and a minor life challenge to overcome. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen flawlessly follows this formula, yet still manages to drown in mediocrity.

Lohan, fresh from the hit Freaky Friday, is the prefect teen star. She has a great body and an interesting face. She can sing, she has rhythm, and she can play guitar. Whether by talent or by accident, she always seems to be playing herself: cool, alternative, musical and smart. The failure of Confessions to be good despite Lohan's presence indicates a spectacular failure on the part of director Sara Sugarman.

Lohan plays Lola Ceb, a dramatic 15-year-old who moves from New York to New Jersey and confronts her long-legged, acrylic nail-tipped rival, the rich and beautiful burberry-clad Carla Santini (Megan Fox). One strength of Confessions is that it delves to some extent into the highly idealistic, appearance-driven teenage psyche.

One main catalyst of the plot line is Stu Wolff (Adam Garcia), the sleazy lead singer of the band Sidarthur, the man Lola calls "the greatest poet since Shakespeare." Stu is the love of Lola's life, and she suffers an extreme disappointment in finally meeting him. Her blind obsession, which probably every teenage girl can identify with, is based on a lie, which gives the movie a shadow of complexity.

The film is mercifully short, but gives the impression of having gone through extremely heavy cutting. There are many highly undeveloped plots, most notably Lola's romance with Sam (the one-dimensional Eli Marienthal), which gets about 45 seconds of screen time. Also, both Lola and her best friend Ella (Alison Pill) morph into different people about once every scene, with each girl rapidly rearranging her priorities to match the drama of the moment. Lola conveniently has huge life crises over every single facet of her life, from Sidarthur to Ella to Carla.

The worst feature of Confessions is the appearance of garish and slightly creepy cartoons (a la Lizzie Mcguire, but worse), which are extremely irritating. Although the movie is very brief in some senses, bad animation wastes too large a chunk of time.

Teen movies are funny almost by definition, and this one had about two good moments. The first comes when Lola arrives at her new suburban front lawn, and her Mom reassures her, "It's just grass-- It's all over the place." The second hilarious interlude is when Lola wears a gaudy black mourning outfit and burns candles when Sidarthur breaks up.

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen would have been decent without the awful cartoons and good with real character development. As it stands, the film is mostly bad, although improves significantly in its second half.

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen is rated PG for mild thematic elements and brief language.