Could anyone actually enjoy a movie like Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen? It's about a self-absorbed high school girl who moves from New York to New Jersey and finds herself having to re-establish her status as a popular personality. That's a curious start, but the movie soon reveals itself to be interested in little more than being bright, shiny, and cute, content to populate itself with character types instead of real characters. Trying to feel better about itself, the film half-heartedly includes a moral. In the meantime, it functions mainly as a talent vehicle for its singing, dancing, acting star -- Lindsay Lohan.

The movie's high school environment feels plastic and manufactured. Its plot, which involves competing for the lead in a school play and sneaking into rock concerts, is sitcom-trivial. Its situations and humor are banal, unless you've never seen a comedic drunk routine or various showdowns of attitude between a leading girl and her snooty antagonist (Megan Fox, whose arrival is always always always heralded on the soundtrack by the "uh-ohs" of Lumidee's "Never Leave You") or scenes where someone breaks into a room to steal something while another person tries unsuccessfully to slow down and distract the incoming authority figure. So I ask: what teenage girl would enjoy watching this? I'm glad Disney addresses this oft-ignored movie-watching demographic, but if these girls are pandered to so obviously,  won't they feel insulted?

Perhaps the younger teens and pre-teen girls won't be as critical -- the flick feels much more geared to appeal to that age group. Even so, aren't the filmmakers shooting themselves in the foot by making the protagonist a semi-likeable liar (for starters, her real name is Mary but she rather annoyingly insists on being called "Lola")? There's no winning scenario here. If girls are put off by the main character's self-centeredness, they're not going to be able to sympathize. If girls see themselves in Lola, they might find their drama queen tendencies encouraged. And the supposed lesson of the movie -- it's better not to be a self-absorbed drama queen who lies -- will be lost by the ending, which sees our heroine getting everything she was going for in the first place.

As a result, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen is instantly forgettable because its audience has no reason to invest in the movie. The major problem? It's not being sold to  teenagers, but pushed at them. Lola has a poor moral base and is meant to learn something, so she is presented as an example, rather than someone to identify with. She's surrounded by a sparkling shininess that, although eye-pleasing, makes nothing feel real, and that only makes her world more distant. The movie would like to play up its fantasy aspects, but even here it can't get things right because they appear and disappear without any consistency -- Lohan dressed up as Marilyn Monroe in a daydream might be cute, for instance, but it comes up in the middle of nowhere and serves no purpose -- it's only an opportunity for Lohan to play dress-up. These silly elements occasionally leak into the "real" world, such as in a scene where the good girl and bad girl race down the school halls dodging obstacles in exaggerated ways, but since they don't happen often enough, they just feel out of place.

Somewhere close to the end, something happened that almost caused me to believe Lola was deluded and had imagined everything. As it turns out, that wasn't the case (merely bad scripting), but I feel the movie might have made itself more interesting by using the alternate reality plot device, no matter how stale it's become. My own way of making the movie more interesting was to think of it as a metaphor for Lohan's supposed real-life feud with competing teen Hilary Duff, another popular singer/dancer/actress. See, it kind of works, because the good girl and bad girl are both spotlight-seekers, and they are taught that having petty differences is bad. Oh well, whatever. If one has to do that much work to make an unenjoyable movie better, it's not really worth it -- for teenage girls or anyone else.

(Released by Walt Disney Pictures and rated "PG" for mild thematic elements and some language.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.