Confessions of A Teenage Drama Queen

Directed by Sara Sugarman

Starring Lindsay Lohan Alison Pill

Disney

Rated PG

96 mins.

Grade: D-

It’s a sign of contemporary society’s accelerated capitalist-consumption culture that those with disposable income are force fed the newest Next Big Thing before the last one’s even lapsed into overexposure. It’s only been a year since Hilary Duff, that blonde, chipmunk-cheeked teen-queen was packaged and buffed and hard-sold to the pre-teen masses in that glossy YM magazine add known as “The Lizzie McGuire Movie.” Now Lindsay Lohan, so appealing in last summer’s hit “Freaky Friday” has been given honey-blonde highlights in order to be sold as the apparent heir – or rival – to Duff’s lip-gloss throne.

Lohan’s own marketing tool is called “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen” and it’s one of the lousiest pictures to come out of the Walt Disney factory in a long while. It manages the mean feat of making “Lizzie McGuire” look like a decent movie, and it does so by being at least five times as annoying, shrill and vapid as that bit of stale bubblegum.

Though the movie isn’t quite beneath contempt, it’s still contemptible because it aims itself directly at the giggling 9-14 year old girl market, and proceeds to instill the worst, most shallow Cosmo-girl ideals. The relentlessly upbeat message mongering cannot conceal that the pathetic, pitiful superficiality found within. Sure, us unaware adults may condescendingly think this is what little girls want to hear, but do we really need to breed a generation who thinks the greatest accomplishment is to be an American Idol?

Perhaps my loathing of “Drama Queen” wouldn’t be so complete, so bilious as it is, if the central character was someone sympathetic we could root for. Try as she might, the admittedly spunky and likable Lohan can’t make her teenybopper caricature anything more than exasperatingly selfish. (Blame it on Gail Parent’s phony script.)

Lohan’s theatrical Mary, rechristened Lola by her own whim, is moved out of her big city New York enclave to the boring New Jersey suburbs, where her proudly bohemian stylings are at odds with the slit-eyed, fashionista cool of vicious popular girl Carla (Megan Fox.) We are meant to be charmed by Mary/Lola’s penchant for exaggerated, fanciful lies and her extravagant, epically dramatic behavior, but the girl is little more than an attention-starved, self-centered and egotistical brat who fails to understand that the universe does not revolve around “Planet Lola.”

But the girl somehow can still attract satellites into her orbit, such as the uptight good girl Ella (Alison Pill) whom she befriends and the personality-deficient boy (Eli Marienthal) awkwardly shoehorned into the movie to present something akin to a love interest. These relationships come a distant second and third (or is it second and fifth) place to Lola’s quest to be Britney Spears.

That quest begins with her landing the lead in the school play (a “hip” urbanized update of “Pygmalion” titled, sigh, “Eliza Rocks!”) and gaining entry to a VIP party thrown by her favorite band, Sidarthur. Thankfully, we’re never given a chance to bask in Sidarthur’s genius poesy, but we do get glimpses of “Eliza Rocks!” Needless to say, it’s not the kind of play to put most high school shows to shame. Nope, it would be far more to shame most high schools to put on such cheesy, cornball drivel. It disgraces both Stevie Wonder and David Bowie (and, well, George Bernard Shaw, too) but it does give Lohan the chance to show off her wannabe pop star skills, which are considerably stronger than those of Duff.

But, I’m sorry, this “Drama Queen” ain’t so cute. It’s a stilted, superficial and comedy-free assemblage of teen girl clich