Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen (2004) was the crest of the wave of Lindsay Lohan’s popularity. For a minute there, one couldn’t go a day without seeing Lohan’s likeness on billboards, television and posters or pick up the latest gossip in bold print all over magazine racks and newsstands. I was working at a video store when Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen got its home video release and it remained one of the more popular rentals for at least two months.
But with the passage of time comes a new perspective. By now it’s obvious to everyone that the superior Lindsay Lohan film is Mean Girls (2004), not Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen. Admittedly I caught both films when we had them on at work so I didn’t exactly watch them start to finish back in the day. Even so, it was pretty clear to me that Mean Girls, with its Heathers (1988) and Clueless (1995) influences worn proudly on its sleeve, had something genuine to say about the teenage experience. Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen on the other hand is pure Disney with only a few fanciful dream sequences and Mark Mothersbaugh’s music to recommend it.
Revisiting Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen after all of this time I had hoped to discover some forgotten or overlooked facet that would somehow elevate the film and redeem it. This proved to be a naive hope on my part. Returning to Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen I found that Lohan still played her compulsive liar as a cutesy two-dimensional princess; Megan Fox was still a rather witless bully; Pygmalion is referenced but never engaged with in a compelling way; Audrey Hepburn’s style is appropriated without purpose; and that the film, as a whole, feels like a Disney channel original movie.
Turning my attention to Letterboxd I found that Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen still has a loyal fan base, albeit one mostly made up of individuals who were ten, eleven or twelve years old in 2004. Every generation should have its cultural touchstone for its adolescent years, even if the movie is terrible. But one should acknowledge the difference between loving a film and the film’s inherent aesthetic qualities. I, after all, will always have a soft spot for Predator (1987) even though as an adult I realize the limitations of the film.
