Monday, November 21, 2005

Lindsay Lohan - Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father) (2005)

*1/2 (of four)



I remember the glory days of this video-reviewing gig, when the only back-and-forth girl-pop rivalry was Britney and Christina trying to outskank each other with every successive video. (That was a win-win situation, as far as I was concerned.) Now the girl-pop rivalry is between Kelly Clarkson and Lindsay Lohan, and they're competing for the title of Most Scarred Childhood Thanks To Abusive Parents.

Clarkson's "Because of You" features a grown woman wagging her finger at a broken, ambitionless mother figure whose dead spirit was apparently passed along to the daughter. Now here's Lindsay blaming her dad - celebrity tabloid mainstay Michael Lohan, played here by a menacing clone of Gabriel "Satan" Byrne in End of Days - for all her problems.

You know Gabriel Lohan is abusive because he yells a lot and points his finger threatingly in Mom's face and at one point smacks the copy of Parade magazine she's reading right out of her hands. (MOM: But honey! Marilyn vos Savant has a killer brain teaser in her new column that involves prime numbers! I can't live like this!)

A blonde Lindsay Lohan, who also directed this mess, emotes from the bathroom floor while wearing way too much black and blue eye makeup. (Ah, black and blue - the universal colors of spousal abuse.) Intercut are screaming-dad flashbacks that have a nine-year-old Lohan counterpart - played by Lindsay's little sister Aliana - watching all the drama go down in the living room and immediately becoming Scarred For Life.

It turns out - and, damn, Director Lindsay was clever here - the whole scene is going down in a department store window, outside of which a crowd gathers to watch the dysfunctional domestic proceedings. It's all so transparent and heavy-handed it can't possibly be taken seriously.

And, shit, I can't stand Hilary Duff and Jessica Simpson, but I always liked Lohan. For her whip-smart turn in Mean Girls, if nothing else. Shit, she even brought an odd dignity to her uptight-mom-stuck-in-teenybopper-body part in the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday. But after watching Lindsay try to force out the tears in the closing shot of "Confessions of a Broken Heart," I'm gonna have to let her go. You're fired, Lindsay. Clean out your desk. It was fun while it lasted.


P.S. Here's the funniest thing about "Confessions" - Michael Lohan, when asked to comment about his daughter's deadbeat-dad ballad, claimed he was thrilled with Lindsay's ambition and talent. And said he wrote his own song in response, to clear the air. Now, see, coming across that at 7 a.m. would be worth watching. Instead we get this ludicrous TV-movie shit.

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