Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox (I)

2 out of 10 stars

The screaming! The sobbing! The hair-pulling! The tantrums! The wailing! The crying! The recriminations! And that was just my reaction to Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, a candy-colored piece of tripe that chews up perky little Lindsay Lohan and spits her out like so much stale bubble gum. Pretty much misbegotten from the get-go, Drama Queen is stressful where it should be light, flat where it should be fluffy, and has little or no sense of fun and excitement. As girly teen comedies go, this is something like Clueless Through the Looking Glass, where the smart, stylish girl, instead of leading the pack, is punished by the bland clones for being original and unique. Heathers mined this for dark comedy, but the darkest thing about Drama Queen, with its lily-white cast and pastel-pop life view courtesy of Disney at its most sugar-coated, is Lohan's eyeliner. And yes, she uses a bit too much of it.

Lohan, who was so good in Disney remakes The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday, flounders throughout much of Drama Queen as Mary "Lola" Cep, a bohemian-style teen New Yorker transplanted to the wild suburbs of Dellwood, New Jersey. Armed only with an outrageous wardrobe and an overactive imagination, she sets out to conquer her new high school, but finds herself cruelly rebuffed by popularity queen and Heather-in-training Carla (Megan Fox, whose glistening eyes and lean predatory look help her live up to her last name). Befriended by plain-Jane Ella (Alison Pill, the film's one saving grace), with whom she shares a passion for the band SidArthur -- a joke that goes over 99% of the target audience -- she nonetheless wins the lead in the school play, a tiresome modern update of Pygmalion. But her penchant for overdramatizing gets her into hot water, especially when Carla snags tickets for SidArthur's farewell concert and Lola gets zip, but lies in order to save her made-up face.

"Catfight in the wings?" I can hear you asking. If only! Despite a pleasing if uninspiring setup, tailor-made for 10 year-old girls who haven't yet hit the first hard waves of treacherous puberty, Drama Queen squanders every single opportunity it has for fun and games. While the screenplay could have used a bit more polish (Lola's oversized pronouncements don't really fit in her mouth, unlike, say, Alicia Silverstone's bon mots in Clueless), the blame must be laid officially at the feet of director Sara Sugarman, who uses a lead hand instead of a light touch in unfolding Lola's travails. Instead of winning and triumphant, Lola's bouts with high school are dark and kind of brooding, sometimes even with traces of poison pumping through their veins. The resulting rehearsals for the school play, the attempts to get into the SidArthur concert and Lola and Ella's Soho antics are more stressful than most people's workdays. And while Lola's optimism is supposed to seem triumphant, after a point it seems more delusional than anything.

It's not Lohan's fault – entirely. Her failure here, while not her most shining moment, only proves that her weakness is that of most actresses today: she needs a real director in order to tap her full potential. Under the guidance of Mark Waters (Freaky Friday) and Nancy Meyers (The Parent Trap), Lohan was poised and professional, outshining many of her contemporaries; here, she's merely Disney Channel quality, if that. It doesn't help that she's given Hilary Duff-style musical numbers in the nadir of the film, the Pygmalion update Eliza Rocks. While she's white-bread bland if serviceable singing Stevie Wonder's "Living For the City" (don't ask about how it fits in with the play), her leading a teen ensemble for David Bowie's "Changes" is painful bordering on root-canal agony. Add Adam Garcia playing the lead singer of SidArthur as an updated Davy Jones with an alcohol problem, Carol Kane scrunching her way through a prim schoolteacher role and some garish fantasy sequences direct from Lola's cerebral cortex, and the resulting mess is gooey, squishy and stale.

Instead of relying on nascent directors like Sugarman, Disney should forge ahead in its recent tradition of hiring real, actual movie directors like Garry Marshall (The Princess Diaries), Jim Fall (The Lizzie McGuire Movie) and Mark Waters (Freaky Friday) to craft its teen-girl comedies. All three of those films were winning, breezy and surprisingly well-done (plus, two of them grossed over $100 million). If Disney doesn't continue in that vein, movies as bad as Drama Queen could be final nail in Michael Eisner's coffin. Well, if not him, somebody ought to be fired for this.