Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004)

A 2004 Disney teen comedy about a New York girl relocated to New Jersey who schemes her way into the lead of a school musical, this is a film that arrived with modest ambitions and met them. Lindsay Lohan plays Lola, a compulsive liar with theatrical delusions and a rock star obsession, and the movie tracks her rivalry with the reigning queen bee, played by Megan Fox in her screen debut. The plot concerns concert tickets, a stolen costume, a night in a police station, and a school production of Pygmalion retooled as a pop musical. Critics at the time were unimpressed. Audiences gave it a B+ and moved on.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is thin. The film is female-led, directed by Sara Sugarman, and written by Gail Parent, and it takes genuine interest in a girl's interior life, her ambitions, her friendship with Ella, and her relationship with her divorced mother. Later reappraisals have framed it as a women-made satire of how pop culture depicts teenage girls, which is a defensible reading and earns it real credit on that front. The cast, however, is white to a person in every role that matters, with diversity confined to a single supporting police sergeant. Race never enters the frame. Neither does queerness, nor climate, nor body image, nor any economic critique of the celebrity machine it spends ninety minutes ogling. Lola is eccentric and theatrical, and the film never once reaches for a clinical label.

The moralizing is light and brief, mostly a lesson about honesty delivered when Ella discovers that Lola's dead father is in fact alive and living in Manhattan. It passes quickly and does not linger. What remains is a slight, brightly colored confection that has aged into a minor cult item, fondly remembered by the girls it was made for and by almost no one else. A sommelier would call it a pleasant, uncomplicated vintage, best served cold and not examined at length.

Classification: not an Oscar winner, not a sequel, not a remake, not a true story, adapted from Dyan Sheldon's novel, no superheroes, and it opened at number two behind 50 First Dates.