Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004)

If Freaky Friday is the film that gave Lindsay Lohan a warm cinematic welcome, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen is the hasty follow-up, an unendurable vanity project that's as long as any 90-minute movie out there. Sara Sugarman's film aims for the tone, pastel design, and outrageous sartorial sense of Clueless, but its Disney pedigree, as well as the intrusion of a square Disney morality, prevents it from amassing the necessary irony. Wherever it needs to be brash, it's safe. What's left is a tedious tween comedy with precious few laughs or insights, and even less sense of how to appeal to its target audience. The film is modern enough to feature an iMac orchestra and a hip-hop staging of Pygmalion, but its characters' wants and needs are decidedly quaint. Not only are Lohan and her best friend hung up on the kind of glam rock band that teens haven't favored since the 1980s, but Lohan's excessive narration contains numerous allusions to unlikely works of literature. In vain, Sugarman resorts to cutaways and running the action in fast-motion to punch up Gail Parent's script, which includes such zingers as "Are you partially insane?" and "You're being accusatory!" But the film's most obvious deference to Lohan's budding superstardom, at the expense of humor, is that none of the times she breaks into song involve setting up a punch line -- they are presented merely as music videos. In the grand scheme of things, Confessions turns out to function as a rough draft for Mean Girls, the Lohan vehicle released only two months later, which comes a lot closer to being an effective satire of teen politics. Preferring Confessions would be...well, partially insane. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide