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REVIEWSPREVIEWS: Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
Based on Dylan Sheldon’s popular teen novel of the same name, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (COATDQ) is one movie with a plot most teens (especially girls) will be able to identify with. Bubbly and vivacious Lola (Lindsay Lohan) is a New York City teenager whose universe revolves around flowery wardrobes and teen fancies. She enjoys the privilege of being the coolest girl in school.
But her life takes a U-turn when her family moves to the suburb of Dellwood, New Jersey. Finding it an uphill task to fit in to a new place, Lola’s predicaments are complicated by the already present teen queen of the “in” crowd, Carla (Megan Fox). As Lola is entangled in a popularity contest with the stuck-up and contentious Carla, she must handle her cards well to claim both popularity and the starring role in the high school play.
Released by Walt Disney, the movie targets the unsuspecting and innocent teenybopper audience. COATDQ navigates, albeit not so effectively, around the dynamics of typical girlie teenage life. While Lohan may be better than Hilary Duff most of the time, her performance in this flick is not up to the mark. As such, the movie slumps under the baggage of concave acting. The beautiful straightforwardness that made Freaky Friday a terrific movie is definitely absent here.
Crushes, icon infatuations, comic embarrassments, teenage fantasies, rivalries and friendships sans good acting basically sum up what this confession is all about!
The Ladykillers
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After the first 15 minutes of the film, you find yourself wondering what an actor of Tom Hanks’ calibre is doing in a movie like The Ladykillers. And for what it’s worth, you also find yourself thinking what the usually (but not lately) reliable Coen Brothers are doing with a film, whose premise reeks of a well-toned reversion of a dated heist plot.The Ladykillers is a remake of an old Alec Guinness film, and Hanks seems to be having a field day playing the bizarre, yet meaty role of Dr Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, a Greek, Latin and Edgar Allen Poe quoting classics professor from Mississippi, whose real aptitude is crime. Unfortunately, Hanks is the only hoot in this well-intentioned, yet plausibly pathetic movie. As in the original, Dr Dorr rents a room from a sweet little old lady, Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall) in the hopes of emptying the cash room of a nearby casino by tunneling from the cellar of the house.
The oddball bunch of criminals in this scheme can well be summed up as a failed group from a Looney Tunes cartoon audition. The single dimensional characters, each clustered with a one joke premise, such as a trash-talking janitor, a dimwitted high school athlete, a chain-smoking Viet Cong escapee and an explosives expert, are given as much flexibility as a dead duck as they succeed in providing a handful of genuinely hysterical jokes.
As the film progresses to its climax, you really begin to wonder why you spent time on a movie whose only probable asset, apart from Hanks, is its equally bizarre southern gospel-infused soundtrack.—Mohammad Kamran Jawaid
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