The first tweenybopper stars — Lohan, Moore, Duff the Elder — are moving out of adolescence, and the growing pains have been obvious.
Moore’s made some interesting choices that resulted in awful movies, Duff’s apparently trapped herself in kiddieland, and poor Lindsay Lohan has either stopped reading scripts or gone completely insane. Or possibly both; the only way I can explain “Georgia Rule” is that she invented her character’s stepfather-abuse trauma on the fly, and wouldn’t let it go, thus forcing the filmmakers to incorporate it into the plot.
Fortunately, in “I Know Who Killed Me“, the script doesn’t matter. The movie’s utterly ridiculous, an attempt to riff on early Brian de Palma by a director utterly lacking the instinctive cinematic virtuosity that elevates de Palma’s early films above slavish Hitchcock ripoffs. Lohan literally stumbles through her scenes, since her character is missing a couple of limbs; she has impulsive sex with a boy, swears like a sailor, and performs one of the worst on-screen burlesque routines since Demi Moore stormed through the Eager Beaver in “Striptease”.
The burlesque sequence, regrettably, happens prior to the limbs coming off, robbing the film of its one shot at cinematic permanence. Which is probably just as well, since “Lindsay Lohan amputee stripper” would surely fry the Google.
It’s an awful, awful movie. But it’s a cry for help. It has to be. Lohan has gone from working with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin in Robert Altman’s last film, and starring opposite Jane Fonda and Felicity Huffman in what was supposed to be a sure thing, to starring in the kind of grade-Z sado-porn entry an actress is supposed to make when she’s run out of other options. This is Halle Berry territory.
Someone needs to intervene, and soon. Because if Lohan’s career ends now, it’s bookended by this film and “The Parent Trap”, and that’s just wrong.
Not to defend the movie, which I haven’t seen and have no desire to see, but with its sadistic misogyny, arty stylistics, and blatantly nonsensical title, it kind of sounds like the director was trying to riff off the Italian giallo genre. Of course, it should be noted that a great many giallos were just plain awful movies, so maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.
Anyway, I think it’s time for Lohan to go to prison. Not because I think it might rehabilitate her, but because it would be entertaining for the rest of us to watch. I don’t understand why so many in the media continue to enable the girl by pretending that she was ever a gifted actress. I can’t think of a single movie she was in where she gave better than a downright horrible performance (and that includes Prairie Home Companion, where she was woefully outclassed by all of the other actors who understood that “improvisation” means more than “Don’t bother to read the script”).
“I don’t understand why so many in the media continue to enable the girl by pretending that she was ever a gifted actress. I can’t think of a single movie she was in where she gave better than a downright horrible performance…”
Can I get an amen? I suddenly feel less alone.