Review: 'LOL'

Film: LOL
Cast: Demi Moore, Miley Cyrus, Ashley Hinshaw, Douglas Booth, Adam Sevani, Jay Hernandez
Director: Lisa Azuelos
Rating: 1/2

Disney created Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge and Goofy and Disneyland. To put it briefly, Disney gave me a lot of joy as a child and even today on a particularly sad day I turn to my Disney playlist for tunes like 'Tale As Old As Time' or 'A Whole New World' to lift me out of the blues. Science once taught me that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction. I thought the equal and opposite of all the Disney joy was done with by the advent of Britney Spears. Sadly, no!

Disney’s equal and opposite action is the creation of an actress called Miley Cyrus. As unemotive, talentless and unattractive as a bad actor ought to be, Cyrus makes me want to kick myself for having volunteered for the fine cause of critiquing her latest film LOL, a remake of a 2008 french film LOL: Laughing Out Loud.

So armed with a pen and paper, I braved the modern Mumbai phenomenon – freezing cold winter morning – to watch an early show of the said film. “Show is cancelled,” the kind gentleman at the window said, eyeing me suspiciously for arriving all alone at a theatre bright and early for a film that nobody seemed to care much about.

No cabs in sight, I pleaded with him. "Humko review likhna hai," I told him. The ticket was issued, with a smile and I made my way through a multiplex that was yet to wake up. "Watching LOL. All alone in the theatre #LikeABoss" I tweeted.

And then the film opened with a voice over explaining why the opening scene was in slow-mo – apparently it makes them look cool and care free. Blech. The characters in Lola’s (Cyrus) high school are introduced by the voice-over and we understand that she is quite a popular chick, there’s a lot of effeminate, funky hair-do boys in her school and that they are at a tender age where the girls are still virgins, in the process of picking the right mate to deflower them and the boys are a hormonal mess who want to be that mate.

As she waltzes into her home, we see Demi Moore splashing in a bathtub with a kid, and Lola just starts stripping as soon as she enters the loo. A single eyebrow, decides to shoot up into my forehead as the Mom (Moore) asks Lola, “Is that a Brazilian?”. Yeah, the other eyebrow joins his companion on my forehead as the mother announces that she won’t have her daughter behaving like a porn star.

I check my watch. Not even ten minutes have passed. I look around in the eerily empty theatre as Lola gets dumped by Max (Sevani) and garners sympathies of Kyle (Booth). A couple tucked away in the back rows are doing what one expects a couple alone in a movie-theatre to do. Only, I am sitting bang in the middle, disturbing their moment of solitude. LOL.

The film progresses as Lola tries to figure out how to get things straight with Kyle and as her friend Emily (Hinshaw) tries to seduce a math teacher but ends up in the arms of the class geek, Lola takes the form of a younger version of Carrie Bradshaw and a backward one too, making notes in a diary in a monotonous format, asking innovative questions such as, ‘why won’t my mom understand?’, or saying corny and obvious things like ‘I have to keep my feelings to myself or it will ruin our friendship’. The most profound line of the film comes where Lola’s grandma tells her that her mother is sneaking around in love like a teenager to which Lola says “Unfortunately, teenagers are no longer like that,”.

There’s a few songs thrown in to which clichéd montages of the girl and boy bonding, or the girl exploring Paris happens.

Yawn! The film continues to bore even as it moves to European locales of French countryside, followed with teenage angst and friction between the mother and daughter -- very Lindsay Lohan but not half as much fun.

This wannabe Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (much fun compared to this tripe) leaves you gasping for air, and makes you wonder just how stupid teenagers are these days that they have made an icon out of someone as untalented as Miley Cyrus. As for Cyrus fans, aren’t the a little too young to be watching a film whose focal point is the leading girl’s deflowering? Never mind that this happens parallel to the mother’s deflowering post-divorce?  Creepy, dumb and sheerly pointless is what sums up LOL. And to put it in Cyrus fan lingo LOL is so WTF that after watching it you’ll want to really say FML.