Film: 
DVD:
Written by Gail Parent, based on the book by Dyan Sheldon
Directed by Sara Sugarman
Starring Lindsay Lohan and a bunch of other young actors who were constantly living in her shadow
Features:
- Deleted scene (note the use of the singular)
- Music video
- Behind-the-scenes featurette
- Running audio commentary with director Sugarman, writer Parent, and producers Robert Shapiro and Jerry Leider
Released by: Disney DVD
Rating: PG
Region: 1
Anamorphic: Yes.
My Advice: Skip it.
[ad#longpost]Mary…er…Lola Steppe (Lohan) has moved from New York City to New Jersey, thus taking her away from the glamorous lifestyle that exists only in her head. At her new high school, she immediately comes up with a best friend and an arch-enemy and lands the lead role in the school play. Soon, her rivalry centers around a farewell concert for her favorite rock band. Life becomes about getting tickets and getting backstage passes.
I have never seen so many montages in my entire life. There is the montage of her picking out her clothing for the concert, then there is the montage of her getting dressed, then there is the montage of them playing in a rock star’s bedroom: all of them are covered with cheezy teeny-bopper music. But that’s sorta okay, since it’s trying to be a typical teeny-bopper type of movie. The problem is that I don’t even think it hit the mark with that audience. It didn’t make that big of a splash at the box office, and it took another (non-Disney) movie to put Lohan on the map. See, I think Disney was trying too hard to push her in the direction of Britney and Christina when her talents lie in areas other than singing, let alone lip-syncing. I’m willing to chalk up some of the bad lip-sync scenes in this movie to poor engineering, but the rest of it is all Lohan. She just couldn’t quite figure out how to make her mouth look like she was really singing the words.
Otherwise, the movie is just cute. It’s a cute little girly story with an ending you can see coming from the next county over. It’s also filled with lots of cheezy music and girls fawning over badly stereotyped British rock stars who fall far short of their fantasy personages when they finally meet them in real life.
The DVD is stuff du fromage. There is one deleted scene. That’s right, out of everything that wound up on the cutting room floor, just one. There is the obligatory Disney girl-band music video featuring Lohan doing more lip-syncing intercut with scenes from the movie…with Lohan lip-syncing. The featurette is exactly the kind of powder-puff crap that you expect from teeny movies, which I’m sure the target audiences just gobble up. Finally, in regards to the audio commentary, it’s a conversation between some of the artistic staff members of the movie.
Because of this commentary track (and I’ve heard quite a few of them in my day), I have come to the conclusion that the perfect number of people discussing a movie on one commentary track is two. Three people can be okay if they are not just out to try to get as many jokes and recollections of the shoot onto the track and don’t listen to what the other people are saying. Four is just way too much. They can’t come up with a cohesive and interesting statement about the movie at all. There’s plenty of cohesive thoughts going on, and arguably, there are one or two interesting tidbits that come out on this track, but there’s nothing that ventures into that ground-breaking territory where both concepts have equal footing.
So, that’s it. If you’ve got a son or daughter who is of the age to appreciate this movie, chances are they’ve probably already seen it. I wouldn’t bother wasting the time or money on this one.
