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Reviews
Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004)
"Confessions" is like a stale 90-minute sitcom
Coming off an extremely successful performance in the summer hit Freaky Friday, Lindsay Lohan does her best to save the flat and unimpressive script of Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.
Lohan stars as Lola, a teenage Manhattan girl whose dream is to become a famous actress. However, when she moves to a suburban New Jersey town she realizes that her chances of being famous are pretty much zero.
Competing for popularity in her new school with Carla (Megan Fox), she stumbles through life in an almost-klutzy yet largely unfunny way.
The entire movie is like a 90-minute sitcom -- it packs a few laughs but there is never a genuinely funny scene. The humour is based on clumsiness and stupidity rather than wit. In other words, it's comprised of people making fools out of themselves.
There is also a huge gap between the beginning and the end of the movie. There are so many happenings in between it's easy to lose track of the whole point of the film.
Also, many of the characters exist simply for the sake of existing. For example, the roles of Andrew, Lola's father and twin sisters don't serve a lot of purpose to the actual story. It wouldn't hurt if one or more of those characters were cut from the story, to save us some time and grief. Their roles are so tiny they're not really worth mentioning at all.
The ending is pretty cliche-ish as well. Like a lot of Disney movies, it preaches friendship, change for the better, love, etc. However, Confessions does a pretty bad job of it. It's pretty obvious that these are the lessons the movie is supposed to teach; they make it so obvious there is no explanation needed. An explanation IS added, however, in an attempt to simplify things further. But all this does is to add more unnecessary time to the overall product.
Confessions does have some positive points though. The music isn't too bad, even though they may have overused the "Uh-Oh" song by putting it in three different scenes. The acting in general by Lindsay Lohan and her co-stars is extremely good, but it's not enough to save this stinker.
BOTTOM LINE: 1.5 stars out of 4
Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge (2001)
One of those rare TV movies with a plot
The thing that distinguishes Halloween II from other TV movies is the fact that it has an actual plot. Most of the TV movies I've seen have the plot of a fourth-grade picture book.
This film's storyline actually works for the most part. The only flaw is the time travelling. If they could travel through time, why not stop Kalabar before all of this every happened?
I thought Kimberly J. Brown's performance was brilliant. She has the charm and the ability to be the next major child actress. All she needs to do is to put a bit more emotion to her acting.
Also, the special effects were impressive for a TV movie. It's hard to find TV movies with special effects comparable to a full-length film. The special effects here surpasses many theatrical productions.
Obviously, this is not an Oscar-worthy film, but it's very impressive for a small-budget film.
Final rating: 3 out of 4.
Rose Red (2002)
A few flaws, but overall pretty good.
Stephen King's "Rose Red" is one of the better TV movies I've seen. Although the storyline can get repetitive at times, the atmosphere and the mood for the film is practically flawless.
The first part of the mini-series was pretty good, basically introducing all of the main characters in the story. You can get a sense of the behaviour of each character, and their uniqueness.
The second part was probably the worst part of "Rose Red." Much of that time was used to try to create some mood for the story. In other words, the movie dragged in the second part. Nothing much happened, except for a few scares here and there.
The finale was the best part of the movie. The storyline really picks up from there, and it gets really entertaining. At times, the movie was actually make my skin crawl because of the spookiness. However, that was the only touch of spookiness in the entire film.
There are a number of problems with this film, but people have to remember this movie is very long. Therefore, the pro-con ratio is actually very positive. Kudos to Stephen King for a pretty good movie overall. However, don't expect this movie to win any AFI awards.
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Ratings (out of four):
Mood/Atmosphere - 3.5
Story - 2.5
Performances - 3
OVERALL - 3