Paul Isaacs

CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE DRAMA QUEEN
Starring Lindsay Lohan, Glenne Headly. Written by Gail Parent. Directed by Sara Sugarman. (G) 89 min. Opens Feb 20.

An adaptation of the kids potboiler by Dyan Sheldon, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen follows the adventures of hi-skooler Lola Cep (Freaky Friday's Lindsay Lohan), a bratty aspirant luvvie with dreams of becoming the next Audrey Hepburn -- although Pia Zadora would be more realistic.

The story begins after Lola's parents' divorce, as her family relocates from rich, white Upper East Side Manhattan to the suburban hell of rich, white Dellwood, New Jersey. Despite Lola's misgivings about moving so far from Broadway and 42nd, she quickly settles herself, making friends with an obligatory ugly sidekick, Ella (Alison Pill), and making enemies with an obligatory high school bitch queen, Carla (Megan Fox).

Well, so far, so Disney: there's plenty of bright colours and pop songs to entertain the kids, and enough montages of Lohan and Pill in busty t-shirts keep the dads from snoozing. Still, even the most Ritalin-drugged of youngsters should experience an odd cognitive dissonance here. We're meant to cheer Lola on, the eternal underdog in a strange and brutal new world -- high school -- but she's clearly as much of an insufferable, privileged ass as Carla, her rival-in-drama-queenosity.

Lola enjoys a lifestyle the average Seventeen reader can only wet-dream of: a wealthy hippy mom (Glenne Headly), a boyband-esque boyfriend with a vintage sports car (Eli Marienthal), and a Narnia-sized wardrobe of trendy electroclash gear. Within the first 20 minutes, she's even landed the leading part in her high school production of Pygmalion (modernized in bafflingly non-ironic fashion as a hip-hop musical, Eliza Rocks).

It's like watching a re-cut version of Election, where Reese Witherspoon is the hero. If this were a 1980s movie, it would finish with Pill pushing Lola into a swimming pool, or driving her into a truck of manure -- a happy ending for everyone concerned. Instead, those indiginities are heaped upon Carla, who ends up getting dunked in fountain for daring to be only slightly more irritating than the lead character.

Business isn't helped by a wooden leading performance from Lohan, who, when the lighting is good, resembles Frankie Muniz in a blonde wig. As was the case with Freaky Friday, she's out-maneuvered at every moment by her co-star -- not Jamie Lee Curtis this time, but Pill as the gawky Ella, dominating the proceedings throughout despite her put-upon second-banana status.




LOVE LETTERS
Featuring Carmen Gillespie, D. Kirk Teeple. Written by A.R. Gurney. Directed by Alexander Galant. Presented by Lucard Theatrical Limited. Artword Alternative Theatre, 74 Portland. 416-366-7723 ext. 290.

Never underestimate the strength of a powerful cheese. To be sure, Love Letters is an elegant, accessible work, capably acted and staged by its miniscule crew. But boy, is it cheesy – and not just in a mild cheddar sense. This is a fragrant, full-on radioactive Camembert of a play. Which is not to say it stinks.

Love Letters was written in 1988 by A.R. Gurney, a prolific American schmaltz-merchant with an unabashed fondness for WASP-y tearjearkers, preferably involving fights at cocktail parties in New England mansions. Those with the un-ironic ability to weep at Debra Winger death scenes and Linda Ronstadt ballads will be in seventh, eighth and ninth heavens here. For everyone else however, it’ll just be hell.

D. Kirk Teeple and Carmen Gillespie star as Andy and Melissa, two bratty childhood sweethearts. Gurney’s set-up is forehead-slappingly simple: the two actors sit behind desks for the play’s entire duration, reciting letters they’ve sent each other over a lifetime’s correspondence. There’s barely any movement, unless you count the edgy moment where Melissa
changes her cardigan.

Over 50 years, we watch Andy grow from being a staid, simpleton, Catholic poppa’s boy, to being a staid, simpleton Massachusetts senator with a frightening resemblance to John Kerry. Melissa meanwhile, initially the more mature of the two, becomes a painter, but squanders her talent for a life of booze, depression, and every other sensitive artist cliché in the
book.

Needless to say, it doesn’t end well. The pair, obvious soulmates, never get it together, apart from the odd one-night-stand. Whether you buy into their misery – or whether it gives you the urge to upchuck on your programme notes – will depend on your tolerance for slush. But why not give in? Teeple and Gillespie offer such mannered, nigh on unhinged performances, that Love Letters shouldn’t work at all – and yet the finale doesn’t leave an umoist eye in the room.

What a show! What performances! What cheese.




TORQUE
Starring Monet Mazur, Ice Cube. Written by Matt Johnson. Directed by
Joseph Kahn. (14A) 84 min. Opens Jan 16.

Movies are routinely described as being “so good they’re bad”, but Torque, to quote the sage advice of Enid from Ghost World, is “so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again.” The latest braindead-on-arrival offering from the producers of such gems as XXX and The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Torque has been pitched as The Fast and The Furious on motorbikes, but even that faint praise is pretentiously generous. From the first frame, you're deafened between the sound of revving engines and dragging knuckles.

Martin Henderson, the Aussie soap babe from The Ring, plays the unlucky but roguishly handsome biker Cary Ford, who’s set up by a rival hood (Matt Schulze) not once but twice: first for phoney drug dealing charges, then for murder. (Presumably to prove the screenwriter went to high school, Shulze’s villain is named Henry James. This provides one of Torque’s sadly few unintentional laughs, when Ford cries “Henry James! He set me up, man!”). Soon afterwards, following a bizarre biker festival sequence that acts as the movie's sole excuse to show some teasing, ugly T&A, Ford is forced to go on the run, with the murdered man’s brother (Ice Cube), the FBI’s “Biker Gang Division” and the author of The Bostonians not far in tow.

Hollywood action movie pickings are so scant at the moment, that we’ve learnt to forgive such minor misdemeanours as witless acting, sub-chat room scripting, and characterisation that would shame a Saturday morning cartoon. But even for a film that’s just an excuse for an 60-minute chase sequence, Torque is lazy and thrill-free. The Fast and The Furious was a minor exploitation classic, partly because of the weird, elephantine chemistry of Vin Diesel, but mostly because it remembered to include some pretty spectacular stunts. Torque, however, is bathed in mediocre CGI, and director Joseph Kahn edits the action sequences into such tiny split-second chops that any sense of excitement is killed off; next to Kahn, Michael Bay looks as languid as Renoir.




TEACHER'S PET
Featuring the voices of Nathan Lane, Debra Jo Rupp. Written by Bill and Cheri Steinkellner. Directed by Timothy Björklund. (G) 68 min.

Did Michael Eisner secretly appoint Wile E. Coyote as his new director of animation? Over the past few years, Disney has churned out one useless invention after another, each precisely engineered for a critical splattering. Pixar excepted, Eisner Corp. hasn't released a half-decent cartoon since 2000's The Emperor's New Groove, flailing away instead on a production line of limp originals (Brother Bear), creatively bankrupt sequels (The Jungle Book 2) and cheap television spinoffs -- the latest of which being the dire Teacher's Pet, based on a Saturday morning show of the same name.

Teacher's Pet is the creation of Gary Baseman, a talented painter and cartoonist for The New Yorker with a penchant for drawing potato-shaped noses, pus-infested animals and anthropomorphic, lactating blobs -- kids love him, in other words. Nathan Lane voices Spot Helperman, an ugly-looking blue dog who disguises himself as a human to sneak into school with his master, Leonard (Shaun Fleming). Like Pinocchio before him, Spot wishes he were a real boy, but rather than enlisting the help of a lovable top-hatted insectoid, gets Kelsey Grammer instead, playing an evil, Dr. Moreau-like scientist who creates genetic hybrids of pink alligators and Pee-Wee Herman.

What could have made for 12 minutes of enjoyable grotesquerie on the Cartoon Network quickly becomes tiresome at feature length. After the 53rd parade of radish-chinned, snot-drenched animal skeletons, Teacher's Pet ceases being fun and gross and starts being miserable and unpleasant -- a factor little helped by the drab script from Cheers alumni Bill and Cheri Steinkellner, nor by Lane's decision to voice Spot as a grating, Borscht-Belt vaudevillian. Relief comes as usual from the second-fiddle sidekicks, in the form of bird-and-scaredy-cat duo Pretty Boy and Mr. Jolly (voiced by the great Jerry Stiller and David Ogden Stiers, respectively). Perhaps they'd be deserving of their own spinoff spinoff, if Disney isn't too busy producing Oliver & Company: The New Generation.




PAUL BURRELL IN CANADA
From eyeWeekly's "Wandering Eye" diary section, Nov 2003.

Paul Burrell has done something very un-British. Instead of biting his stiff upper lip, Charles and Diana’s ex-butler has told all in A Royal Duty, a memoir about his service with the prince and princess.

The book is, like Diana, polite but deranged, changing tone without warning between commas.

A typical anecdote, on page 35, begins with Burrell gushing over the princess’s corgi-handling skills: “She is the most caring dog owner you could meet,” he (ghost) writes.

A few sentences later, it’s a canine Lord of the Flies: “The smallest and weakest [corgi] was being literally savaged by the others…[it’s] stomach had been torn open and there was blood and mess everywhere.”

Such egregious tattling was simply too much for The Daily Telegraph. “Nothing in the experience of the Queen could have prepared her for a world in which loyalty and service are forgotten,” it fumed. “We… prefer self-discipline and trustworthiness.”

The Wandering Eye caught up with Burrell at Chapters at Richmond and John recently, on the Toronto stop of his North American publicity jaunt. We are pleased to report him fighting fit; he will not be silenced.

He wore a tidy black suit with an open-necked pink shirt. Security was heavy, and Burrell was exiled to a single table near the Ursula K. Le Guins. Yards of emergency tape, velvet cordon and monobrowed guards cut the butler off from his queue of about 100 fans.

“Have you read the book,” Burrell asked us, as we gave him our complimentary copy to sign.

“Yes,” we lied. “About half-way through.”

“Well, did it surprise you? It’s not the book many people think it is.”

Not half. There are minor scandals here and there, but nothing too disgraceful: that Burrell bought porn for Prince William (the British, non-erection revealing kind, one hopes); that the Duke of Edinburgh isn’t such a cad; and that Prince Charles once threw a book at Burrell’s head for refusing to lie to Diana about Camilla Parker-Bowles.

“Remember,” Burell tells us conspiratorially, “I think it’s important that history is written by witnesses, not by people who reinvent things when they’ve never been there. So thanks for coming.”

Then it’s a firm handshake and we are escorted away, silently thanking him for such a refreshing redefinition of the word “history.”

Towards the exit, a semi-obese man tired of waiting for his wife in line begins to scream: “This is mind-blowing crap! Where’s the toilet? Me finding the toilet is way more important.”

A very unsporting Canadian.