The Bechdel Cast - Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen with Sequoia Holmes

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

Teenage drama queens Caitlin, Jamie, and special guest Sequoia Holmes head to a Sidarthur concert and chat about Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.  (This episode contains spoilers) For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast Follow @sequoiabholmes on Instagram.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, this is Matt Rogers. And Bowen Yang. We've got some exciting news for you. You know we're always bringing you the best guests, right? Well, this week we're taking it to the next level. The one, the only, Katherine Hahn is joining us on Las Culturistas. That's right, the queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture.

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if movies have women in them. Are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands or do they have individualism? The patriarchy's effing vast. Hey, Jamie. Hey, Caitlin. Did I ever tell you about how my dad actually died in a graphic motorcycle accident where his body was strewn all over New York City. Ever heard of it? What? Oh my gosh. Now I'm actually sorry that my mom was being a huge bitch to you a second ago. I wasn't before, but now I am.

No, I understand. But just so you know that my dad definitely died in that exact way. Totally. Wow. This movie is kind of like Mean Girls, isn't it? At least the first act. Yeah. Because I had not, well, we'll get into this, but I was like, what? It's a warm up. I think it is a warm up. Yeah. For Mean Girls. Anyways, welcome to the Bachelor cast. My name is Jamie Loftus. My name is Caitlin Durante. Or is it? Wow, it's Mary. They're a liar. Mary Durante. This is our show where we analyze movies through an intersectional feminist lens using the Bechtel test as simply a jumping off point to initiate larger conversations. But Jamie,

tell us, tell me, Caitlin, aka Mary, and anyone else what the Bechdel test is, please. Yes. Well, it is a mediometric invented by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Sometimes it's called the Bechdel-Wallace test, originally made as a bit for Alison Bechdel's famous comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in the 80s, but it has since become a popular media metric. Lots of different versions of it. Here's the one that we talk about towards the end of every episode. We require that there be two characters of a marginalized gender with names who talk to each other about something other than a man for more than two characters of a marginalized gender with names who talk to each other about something other than a man for more than two lines of dialogue preferably a meaningful exchange and

spoiler alert because it's such a small part of the show we're not going to have much of an issue on this show there's not going to be a lot of teasing things apart Not for this movie. This movie is about girls lying to each other. About kind of whatever. And that passes. And that's beautiful. And we celebrate that. This is a movie about women's wrongs. Yes.

Because we are covering Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, a 2003 movie starring Lindsay Lohan. It's so true. And I also did not realize this was a Disney movie. Yeah. We've been covering so many live action Disney movies recently. Yeah. And so I do feel the need to repeat, you know, I will piss on Bob Iger's grave, etc. Of course. However, this is the show and the show is about formative movies. whether we like it or not confessions of a teenage drama queen its impact was felt sure let's get our guests in the mix i'm very excited so excited to have host of the podcast black people love paramore it's sequoia holmes hello welcome hello and welcome i'm so excited to be here talking about this movie with you. Oh my gosh. Yes. Tell us all about your relationship with this movie.

So I was a Disney Channel kid and I would like to specify that that is different from a Disney kid. I was not a Disney kid. I was a Disney Channel kid. This movie was in constant rotation on Disney Channel at a point, probably around the year it came out, maybe the next year. They had the promos everywhere. I could say certain lines from the movie word by word because the promos were so seared into my brain, although I had not seen it in about 15 years. So yes, I watched it a lot as a kid. Nice. Jamie, how about you? Similar deal. I think I saw this movie in theaters when it came out. a kid. Nice. Jamie, how about you? Similar deal. I think I saw this movie in theaters when it came out. I feel like I was like the target audience for this movie.

And also huge DCOM fan. We just covered Smart House, one of the all-timers. Fantastic one. It's so good. And this movie does feel like a high budget decom and that's a compliment yes where there's a lot of like sound effects a lot of boings a lot of splats and a lot of reinforcing the family unit and that is how you know you're watching a decom boing splat mommy daddy and that's kind of how it goes and i ate that shit up and i

also loved lindsey lohan still do she just had a baby oh she did oh my goodness she did i really keep up so congratulations to her yeah i found it out from jamie lee curtis's instagram doesn't matter but that is who broke the news to me. Oh, my God. Well, because she is Lindsay Lohan's mom. Mom. More or less. Absolutely. She seems to still kind of feel that way.

And I thought that was really sweet. Oh, my God. That is very sweet. And at one point she was Lindsay Lohan. That's a connection you don't forget. Very much that. That's true. They literally swapped.

Yeah. So 2003 Lindsay Lohan. I mean, I think we're kind of approaching because I guess Mean Girls is peak Lindsay Lohan. But 2003, we've got Freaky Friday and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. She's firing up to reach her peak. And I was so I just remember loving this movie and returning to it. Yeah, there were certain things I remembered. I remembered the entire Sid Arthur song which I wasn't expecting I remembered every lyric to that girl was a one-shot oh it's so good so good I didn't remember that there were guys with blue hair dancing behind her and I still don't understand why that happened I still don't get it there was no no, no answers were given. But I'm so excited to talk about it. I think that some parts of it hold up in an interesting ways and other parts of it are parts of the movie. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Caitlin, what's your history with

this one? I had never seen it. I think this was targeted toward a younger crowd than i was at the time of this movie coming out because i was a junior in high school i think so i was like movies about 15 year olds no thanks lola does need to grow up she has a lot to learn but i love her yeah but yeah i had never seen it i also get this movie confused with confessions of a shopaholic and for a while I kind of just thought they were the same movie I was like oh yeah confessions of a teenage drama queen that's the one with oh my gosh what's her name something fisher isla fisher yeah and it's also like same naming convention same hair color you know one can't be blamed I've never seen confession of a shopaholic me neither me either but i think we've gotten requests for it so i'm sure we'll cover it

someday i mean maybe i remember reading those books because i think that my mom let me read them because they were pink question mark and we were you know like we were still figuring out how society works sure we still We still are. Yeah. She's like pink book. My daughter can read it. And that's how I learned how, um, how people with vaginas masturbate.

I didn't know. Oh. And then I read that book when I was like 10 and I was like, you can what? That's wild. Interesting. I learned you can masturbate by masturbating. And likewise. I really needed instruction.

Wholesome. And that depressed, compulsive shopper really helped me out. And this is an early, I mean, we couldn't have known it at the time, but this stars very early Megan Fox role in kind of her peak Mean Girl era, which I have a lot of thoughts on. I'm excited to talk about it. Same. Yeah. The DDR scene. Oh, I said it well about this movie, the DDR scene. You can't take it from us. It's so good. It's so funny. Shall I get into the recap and we'll go from there. Let's do it. And Sequoia, feel free to jump in whenever. Okay. We're in New York City.

We meet a teenage drama queen, Mary. That's Lindsay Lohan. Although she wants to be called Lola instead of Mary. Love it. So I will refer to her as Lola. She is fantasizing about being able to live in New York by herself when in reality, her mom, Karen, played by Glenn Headley, she is moving Mary and her two little sisters to a suburb called Delwood, New Jersey. And this is something that Lola deeply resents. Can I just shout out really quickly at the beginning,

the first thing that unsettled me physically watching this movie was- Oh my gosh, I know what you're gonna say. The flip? Yes. Okay. The flip. I was unsettled by the flip.

At the beginning when, that's wild that you knew I was unsettled by the flip. Uncanny Valley stuff really does not sit well with me. It's at the beginning when Lindsay Lohan is like, mother darling. And we're like, okay, her British accent hasn't improved since the parent trap.

No offense. Yeah. She's had half a decade, but whatever. Anyways. But then she's like, I, yay,

I live in New York. Yippee. And then she flips and it is like, it's the weirdest. I love it. Okay. The thing that the guy does in singing she flips and it is like it's the weirdest i love it okay the thing that the guy does in singing in the rain where he like runs up the wall and then like flips backwards she does that against a tree how did i miss that oh my god because it's so noticeable she does a full-on like cgi stunt it was alarming it looks really weird how odd you have to go back it's really

funny i have to and they've like piped in adr over it to try and distract so it's just like lindsey lohan being like yippee woohoo and oh yeah yeah yeah yes yes i do remember this part yeah i mean we prepped for this episode a couple days ago and i've thought about it at least twice a day since i thought again it's like the flip how do we not know at what point lindsey lohan's love interest becomes relevant to the story but we can't cut the flip it's haunted okay so lola starts at a new school where she meets ella also the two main characters being lola and ella they sound too similar that was a screenwriting problem yeah anyway ella is played by ellison pill baby ellison pill fun they both love this band called sid arthur and its lead singer, Stu Wolf. And they become friends immediately based on that. That felt authentic to me. I'd like the moment of like, just seeing someone at school where you're

like, oh my God, one thing in common. I'm not alone in the whole world. It's nice. Yeah, for sure. And then Lola meets Carla Santini. That's Megan Fox. And her band of mean girls who think that New York City is gross and dangerous and they're not impressed that Lola came from there. The princesses of New Jersey. I loved

Carla's entrance is so funny. It is prompted by nuts. She just comes in hot for no reason. She stomps in and she's like, hi, I'm Carla Santini. And you're like, who asked? Like, I love it. They're just like, Megan Fox, go. And then she did. Yeah. Is LumiD's Uh-Oh playing while she's entering? It was such a big song that year. Yeah.

Like, it was all over Mean Girls. I think Mean Girls came out in 2004. Am I wrong? Yeah, yeah. That's correct. Okay, yeah. It was just Lindsay Lohan coded, I guess. It's so weird because it plays so many times in this movie. It's like almost every time Carla's in this scene, you're like, wow. Every time.

It's like, there's trouble. Uh-oh. Yeah. I loved that song. It's a good one. It reminds me of, like, it's, I don't know. There are some songs to me that I will forever associate with like school bus. And that was a big time school bus song.

That's fair. It feels like being driven to school summer 2003 to me. Yeah. Wow. It's nice. So then Ella introduces Lola to this boy Sam who Lola thinks is cute for some reason like right i don't know anything about the actor who plays sam but even he seems confused as to why he's in the movie yeah he's just like hi i'm i'm in the scene now i guess wild so lola thinks he's cute but she doesn't want a boyfriend

right now because she's trying to focus on her acting career fair enough I love that for her yeah absolutely inspiring but don't worry she's gonna get one anyways yeah whether she likes it or not it's a Disney movie it's 2003

you're getting a boyfriend they're always lurking somewhere and he is it doesn't seem malicious like some teen movie boyfriends, but there is just the feeling that he's just out of frame for whenever the moment is right. That's fair. He doesn't feel malicious, but the other guy in the movie, harder to say.

We'll see. We'll get there. I have many thoughts. What is going on with Stu and her father? I'm like, what are these men thinking? Yeah, that's, yeah. Spoiler alert. She's got a dad and he's a fucking mess.

Not that that's a spoiler for most dads, really. Yeah. The truth. Or people. Yeah. Beautiful. But he's pretty bad. Yeah.

Okay, so Lola keeps hanging out with Ella. She goes to Ella's house. Ella's mom doesn't like Lola or Lola's mom because she thinks that they're weird and she doesn't like that Lola's mom is a single mother. She's like very rich, white, conservative, suburb type. What's funny is I feel like those moms are most often married but still single moms as in the dad isn't doing anything anyway so you're also a single mom so you should feel in camaraderie with lola's mom anyways totally yeah you should be unionizing actually totally right they should be unionizing but lola's mom is a potter she makes pottery i think for a living and which i suspect after i

just re-watched the princess diaries recently and that movie i do still feel like they didn't make a single mistake in it i'm pretty sure that one holds up for sure yeah and i think that there's tropes from the princess diaries that were ripped off for years after that, including cool artist mom. And I think that that's why we have mom and dad met and fell in love. And it was so romantic. But then her dad died in a motorcycle accident when she was very young. He was splattered across two streets. That was a funny lie detail. They say that they found him strewn across 9th Avenue and 10th.

The distance between 9th and 10th Avenue in New York City is long. So it's like it did his body part. Those are like the super long blocks. Yeah. It takes like five minutes to walk from one to the next. And she knows that. She's so shameless. And the tone with which she's telling this is extremely goofy, I would say.

It's an extremely goofy tone. And it's almost as if she's making it up. But we don't know that yet. Yeah. I kind of like I've seen, you know, varying opinions on how dated those imagination sequences look. I thought they were fun, though. They're in on it. That's the thing for me

yeah like it's dated sure but they're definitely in on the joke so right i'm into it and that's where all the goofy like beep beeps and like right so you're like okay so this if this isn't a lie it's in very poor taste she is like making a meal out of the story of the death of her father yeah and ella is like oh damn i'm so sorry i had no idea then at school carla is talking about how she got the lead in the upcoming school production of pygmalion and how she's envisioning a modern day retelling of the story set in New York City, where Eliza is a cashier or something like that. But then Lola's disappointed because she was hoping to audition for the role. But then she learns that auditions haven't even happened yet and that Carla was just being very arrogant. So Lola shows up to the audition.

Her teacher, Miss Bagoli, played by Carol Kane. Oh my gosh. I feel like Carol Kane was even better than I remembered. And I don't think I knew who Carol Kane was the last time I saw this movie. She was so good. A highlight. Truly a highlight. And I thought that there would be i feel like a trope that we see a lot with like goofy teacher character is that like the main girl will give her a makeover to like show how selfless she is like it happens in clueless it happens in a bunch of different movies yeah but i like that it doesn't happen here and miss bagoli is just like allowed to be a weirdo carol kane character the whole time and we love her and she just really cares about the drama club it felt true to life yes yeah yeah and she's in charge of this production she describes the adaptation

that they're doing it's this like modern day version that Carla had been describing so it's clear that Carla either like influenced or probably bullied Miss Bugoli into doing this version of the story called Eliza Rocks kind of inspired of Megangan fox to think of that there's somebody like l names like carla ella lola eliza bagoli miss bagoli like there's way too many l's going on that this is a conspiracy stew sam the men all have s names what's her dad's name oh my god do we even get to find out i don't know he might just be dead oh his name is callum callum step well step lola step yeah interesting um there's that scene where lola is overhearing carla being like here's what i think this version

of pygmalion should be. Like, we don't live in England. It's not the 19th century. Let's update it to the modern world and give this like fresh new modern lens on it. Meanwhile, Lola is like, no, the classics should stay classics. And I'm like, kind of on Megan Fox's side in that argument. Not gonna lie. But yeah yeah i just feel like why rule it out you know let's let's see what she wrote down before we rule it out well naturally you have to rule it out because lola is worldly of the world and miss santini is just a little new jersey girl that's the whole thing it is so wild because it's like positioned as classism but it it makes it seem like rich girls from New York are a protected class. It's really bizarre.

You're like, what is this rivalry? I'm pretty sure you're both fucking loaded. I don't know. Lindsay Lohan character, therefore underdog. Exactly. So then Lola is like, wait, I'm at an audition, but I don't have anything prepared. So I loved it. I loved it so much.

She like knows what she's there for. And they're like, okay, sing a song. And she's like, but I didn't prepare anything. I loved it. I loved it. It's so good. And then cutting to pissed off Megan Fox expression.mp4. You're just like, yeah.

Right. Because Lindsay Lohan's vocals just obviously killed it, crushed it naturally. So, of course, Megan Fox is going to be so mad. Change the game. Yeah, because she has sung a song by her favorite band, Sid Arthur. People are blown away. That kid Sam is in the back and he's like, wow. And we're like, a star is born.

Wow. A solid high school alto. Sam was just in the back, very high school musical coded. There was so much about this movie that like had other, like reminded me of other movies. The two twins in the beginning reminded me of Parent Trap, along with her British accent. Lumity's Uh-Oh is very Mean Girls. And there's some some other things i'll point out when we get to them yeah sam looming in the back just reinforces my theory that he's on the side of every scene just in case because i feel like sam is the most studio notes part of this movie um and so i feel like they're like we're just gonna keep this kid on set. And whenever a Disney executive calls and says, where's the boy?

We'll just throw him in there and see what he does. Poor kid. Just write him out of the movie. Leave him alone. Okay. So then the cast of Eliza Rocks is announced. Lola is nervous that Carla beat her out for the leading role. And then there's this whole like obstacle course where they're running through the hallways

toward the cast list. And they discover that Lola has been cast as Eliza, which she's very happy about. And then Carla's like, well, my part, Mrs. Higgins, is actually more interesting. And that's the part I actually wanted all along. Okay, girl.

Have at it. You got it. I loved that. I was like, wow, that is extremely drama club behavior. So drama club. Where you're like, actually, it's Reno Sweeney's best friend who really has the story. And you're like, yeah, totally. Totally.

Whatever helps you sleep at night. Go for that. I just saw theater camp which i absolutely loved it's so funny everyone should go see it okay um although by the time this episode comes out it might not be in theaters anymore anyway i loved it but there are things about this movie where i was like wow i get it now because I've seen theater camp. That's very funny. Also, one of Carla Santini's little background friends is the girl who played Casey on Life with Derek, which is also a Disney Channel show. A notorious Disney Channel show.

A notorious Disney Channel show that was canceled because the two lead characters were supposed to be step siblings and they had too much on-screen chemistry and seemed sexual and they actually were dating in real life so i was distracted by her a lot of the time too i was looking and i was like this is the girl that couldn't keep life with derrick on air because like they were too horny to right play step siblings and they were actually fucking so wow i feel like every time i hear the life with derek saga it's like a fever dream yeah because you're like that is so scary yeah and also just so disney it's like no they have too much chemistry the kids are gonna get the wrong idea i didn't see it at all as a child i thoroughly did not see it but other kids swear they saw it now that we're adults are like no i always thought it was weird no you didn't sure no you sure disney executives stealing children's jobs

because they're a little too good at their job that's life with derek was i think that was like the tail end of my disney channel career fair to the point where i was basically watching in secret yeah and um and i don't remember seeing it. And I was too old to be watching it. Fair. I might have been a little bit too. It was Canadian. That was another thing about it.

It was like a little, like, you know, Canadian television has a little weirdness to it sometimes. Did you watch Degrassi? I was huge, huge Degrassi. My cousin and I, the first eBay purchase that I ever made, we did it in secret on my aunt's account because we bought a bootleg dvd of the abortion episode of degrassi that they wouldn't show it yes yes yeah i watched it one time and i was like why did i never see this episode again they aired it one time on the end i would watch a three-hour documentary about why that wasn't i mean i know

why it wasn't shown in the u.s but i want emails really bad interviews i really want to know they showed so much wild shit on degrassi all of the time i'm like oh my god this is too far i don't understand but okay i was like they showed the episode of degrassi where emma's like i go to the woods and have sex for different colored bracelets and that was just something that writers made up right and got gonorrhea and she calls it a social disease and it's like a whole traumatizing thing like if you're watching as a child you're like oh shit like I can't fucking ever get gonorrhea or something it's just a lot because it's a lot Emma's voice is forever locked into my head you gave me a social disease like she really felt that with her whole heart wow oh i love that show anyway uh what oh because life with derrick canada confessions

we had a lot of okay a lot of leaks there yeah no it was beautiful to watch but if you were born within a five-year period you i missed the whole thing. I missed all of that. That's okay. Okay, thank you. It's for the best. Okay, so then Lola hears the news that her favorite band, Sid Arthur, broke up because the lead singer, Stu Wolf, has left the band. And she's devastated. Then there's the DDR scene where Lola challenges Carla

to a DDR contest during which Carla tells Lola that she has insider info that Sid Arthur is playing one final farewell concert in New York next month. Plus there's an after party, but it's very exclusive

and it's invite only and lola lies and says that she and ella already have tickets and invitations to the party now this scene is amazing amazing lola's outfit from this scene she has on like a backwards trucker hat, very Britney Spears circa 2003, and a jersey. And it is so Miley Cyrus in the 23 music video coded to me. Very, I'm in the club, high off perp with my J's on. And I loved it so much. I was thoroughly entertained. I read that this was so intense that Megan Fox had a body double for the DDR scene. Really?

Because she's, oh, yeah, which I don't know. I mean, I guess she was doing like kicks and stuff. I don't know. I just love it's like I had a whole headcanon thing when I was rewatching that scene because this movie is written by Gail Parent, who's like a legendary writer and but was in her 60s when she wrote this so i feel like she probably just like asked her like granddaughter or grandkid like hey what's something like dynamic that kids do so this scene isn't boring and they're like ddr baby i find it very funny so so there are a lot of popular girl tropes present in the carla character but then also she's a

theater kid who's a ddr champion which is extremely subversive for a popular so dorky yeah i remember being like it's weird that she's really good at DDR and people are like, this is cool. I don't remember that being the general narrative. I remember my best friend from first grade to forever was really good at DDR. But being good at DDR, first of all, did not mean you were cool. And second of all, did not mean you were a good dancer. That's the most important part. It just meant you could stomp really fast.

Now, maybe it was cool because carla santini was into it and so maybe it was cool in the new jersey suburb that they were from because carla could do it i could see it i could see it low-rise jeans ddr perfect terrifying it did look hard i wouldn't have been able to do it either so i understand her having a body double that tells me lindsey did not have a body double and she decided to do that on her own she's like i'm gonna learn the choreography good on you good on you lindsey couldn't be me but you got it good for her okay so now lola has to scramble to get tickets to the concert but her mom won't let her go so then lola goes on a very culturally appropriative hunger strike. We'll talk about that.

And then her dad, who turns out to be alive, he is not dead and smeared all over the streets of New York City at all. He's alive. He offers to take Lola. So now Lola is going to the concert and Ella agrees to go with her and they're about to buy tickets, but oh no, they're sold out and they have no idea how to get an invitation to the after party. Right. Lola says that she cannot go with her dad and she doesn't explain why. And it's because she's told ella that her dad is

dead and strewn across new york city right and so she's like no no he can't go and so she somehow convinced her mom to let her and ella go alone or ella's parents will be in new york city for some reason yeah and they're gonna pick them up from the station yeah and so she's like okay whatever you can go but little does lola know her mom has actually had her dad go into the city and tail them stock secretly yes i think this mom character is i mean there's not much to her but i feel like maybe it's just like the actor but i feel like there's more to this mom character than I thought because it felt like she's both very like she clearly loves Lola, but is also so sick of her shit at all times. There's no scene she's in with Lola where she's not completely exhausted when the scene starts. Like they don't even get into arguments because she just like doesn't have the energy for it.

From like speaking to my own mother about raising me as a teenager i like to think i was a delight allegedly that's how a lot of mothers feel about their teenage children and i was nowhere near as dramatic as lola my mom was so over it by the time i was about 15 or 16 she was like i was so over parenting you like it wasn't even a joke i was so exhausted so sure that tracks i liked it yeah especially because she had like twins who were young and then the most dramatic teenage daughter of all time it does seem exhausting yeah i liked the performance because i feel like usually the mother's either goofy or like helicopter but this this one's just tired it's realistic she just wants to make pottery in new jersey you know

and i'm an only child so the two twins i'm sure she was over it oh i can't even imagine yeah okay so they don't have tickets they don't have an invitation but lola is like don't worry we'll go buy tickets from scalpers and we'll figure out the rest from there so they make arrangements with ella's parents to pick up the girls when they get into the city and then so they're all set to go to the concert lola tries to pick out an outfit there's that whole kind of montage she can't figure out what to wear from her own clothes so she asks sam to steal her eliza costume so that she can wear that um because we're like i guess sam needs something to do he hasn't been in the movie for 25 minutes so that doesn't seem to be why that's there there's a scene where i think this has already happened at this point but where like i had like a meltdown and i rewound and i was like no rewound oh that makes me sound so old

i went i went back in the file i was watching because at one point you just cut to all three of them are hanging out and you're like when did he become involved with this friend group yeah and i checked and we don't know no we don't screen, he became friends with them because she has a crush on him. It's implied that Ella knows him. It didn't seem like they were friends. I'm confused. We don't know who they are to each other. No.

Ella and Sam. Yeah, I guess they're friends, but we never see them interacting. So we don't know their dynamic. No. I guess New Jersey small town shit is what I'm supposed to take from it. I guess so. It was so confusing. I went back and watched the scene where she's like, oh, that's Sam. small town shit is what i'm supposed to take from it like i guess so it was so confused i like went

back and watched the scene where she's like oh that's sam and i guess i like misinterpreted it and have my teen movie goggles on where i thought she was saying that's sam like he's he would never talk to us but apparently she's saying that's sam my good friend yeah that's sam we'll be hanging out with him later it's so hard to know okay so lola is getting her costume stolen for her meanwhile opening night for the play that i kept forgetting was part of the movie uh opening night is in one week. So that's coming up. And then the concert is that night. So Lola and Ella go to the concert. But oops, they've lost the cash to pay for the tickets from scalpers. They try and fail to sneak in. And so Lola is like, all right, don't worry.

Well, we can still go to the after party. So they walk 67 blocks. Not sure why they don't take the subway, especially because it's pouring rain. But they walk to Soho. They lost their money. They lost all of it? Like, damn, Ella didn't have her own wallet? I'm confused.

Yeah, don't they have like five bucks for who knows so they get to soho where the party is and lola's dad is there like tailing them keeping an eye on them and she's like dad go away and ella doesn't realize that this guy who is following them is lola's dad she just thinks he's like a stalker and she's panicked behind it mind you she's freaking out that this grown man with a dog is stalking them in the rain these two girls in these dresses yeah i too would be scared yeah i remember maybe having this thought when i first saw it or the last time i saw it where it's like a feeling of internalized shame when you're watching a movie and they're like we can't give up now and just knowing in my heart i would have given up by now oh a long time ago i would be back at the hotel like and also they're staying at like the ritz or what i'm like i would be back

at the hotel yeah something like that yeah let's get out of here i could always just go home not a problem yeah i love going home i love it i love it so much it's raining i'm going home yeah i have to walk more than five minutes i won't no thank you i'm going home yeah so they finally reach stew wolf's loft where the party is. And Stu comes outside. He's played by who? I forgot to write it down. He's played by Adam Garcia, who I don't know any. I think he's mostly a theater guy.

Okay. So Stu comes outside. He is drunk and he's making a scene. And Lola and Ella rush over. They find him passed out in a pile of trash bags. They take him to a diner and then there's this thing where he drunkenly throws a donut at a cop so they all get taken to a police station. And then Lola's dad has to come and bail them out, which is when Ella learns that Lola was lying about her dad dying in that motorcycle accident.

And Ella is furious that she made up such a horrible lie. And Lola's like, well, I wanted to seem more interesting. And also your family was shaming my family. So screw you. They get cleared to leave the police station and stew is like you all shall come to my party so lola and ella and one of the cops goes to the after party i kind of forget that the the cop tags along I don't remember that. Yeah. She's there, still in uniform.

One of the few people of color with a speaking role in the entire movie. And so at the party, Lola and Ella, they chat, they make up, they're friends again. And they see Carla there, who is visibly pissed that they managed to get into this exclusive party with stew wolf hanging out with stew wolf yeah yeah carla is diabolical i forgot how she handles the situation the next day and a classic situation where a problem could be resolved by having a digital camera which most teenage girls or many teenage girls did in 2003 having just photo evidence but what can you do for some reason i remember a digital camera they didn't have one though because they didn't have photo evidence they did not no they didn't i was like i guess that you would have to be in a certain like class to be.

But it's like they're all rich. They're rich. Maybe they left it in the bag with the money. It's true. Yeah, they left it. I love that a critical thing happens like where they lose all the money mid montage. You don't see it coming. Yeah.

Yeah. So then at the party, Lola has like a one-on-one chat with stew and she realizes that he's not the like poet and lyrical genius and deep thinker that she thought he was he's actually just a drunk loser so she and ella leave cut to them back at school and carla is like lola you didn't go to that party you're lying also you lied about your dad and also your name isn't even lola it's mary carla is taking big swings 24 7 and she's hitting without well almost fail. She's about to take her biggest and most illogical swing. And it almost plays out for her, which is wild. Right.

Because this scene happens in a classroom. And then the following scene happens when they're rehearsing for Eliza Rocks. And Carla humiliates her in In front of the whole cast. And Miss Bagoli. Who laughs at her. She's just like. What a loser this Lola is. Horrible.

I did kind of laugh. I was like you know Miss Bagoli is underpaid. She's allowed to laugh at her students every once in a while. Miss Bagoli. Yeah. So now everyone thinks. Miss Magoli. Yeah. So now everyone thinks that Lola is a big liar and she gets so depressed.

She is, to be fair. Yeah, that is so true. Not that that justifies Carla. No. But she is a big liar. Right. She's imaginative. But this is the one thing

she didn't lie about. But, you know, the cry wolf, that whole thing. Cry Stu Wolf. Whoa. Is that why his name is Stu Wolf? I don't know. Oh, my gosh. Wow.

Another conspiracy. If that was a coincidence and they, I would be kicking myself. Yeah. So everyone at school is against Lola. She's very depressed. She fakes being sick so that she can get out of like doing the play and being friends with anyone. But then Ella shows up and she gives her this heartfelt speech about how Lola has inspired her and how she can't give up. And so Lola gets up and goes to the school.

The play is about to start with Carla playing the role of Eliza, but then Lola shows up to reclaim her role, much to Carla's dismay. Then the play goes well, and a star is indeed born in Lola. Absolutely. I love their unhinged adaptation. It's fun. It looks good.

It's fun. It seems like it is all Lindsay Lohan narration with some other kids in the background. I just love it. I've never seen Pygmalion or My Fair Lady. I know the story. I know the overarching. I just like, I feel like I've only seen like millennial coded adaptations of it, including this two minute montage. She's all that. Yeah. Like stuff stuff like that where it's like you see clueless and then you're like oh emma right we should i bravely read pygmalion in high school and then i have seen the movie my fair lady we should cover it sometime on the show i'd be down

to do that anyway so the play happens it goes well And then there's an after party at Carla's house where Stu Wolf shows up to return things to Lola because she left her iconic Coke bottle cap necklace behind. And he is colluding with Lola's father in showing up where you're just like, her father is such a disaster. What is going on here? Yeah, he has a famous dog or something. Is he a children's book author? I could not understand what his job was. It's confusing that Stu Wolf recognizes the dog from a cartoon when it is sort of just like an encyclopedia picture of a dog but i guess that he makes children's books about his dog yeah weird any way you spin it i'm gonna be nice and say the

stew wolf is 25 and that's being nice because i'm certain that the man is for you hanging out with high schoolers colluding with the father or not very very odd bad bad i would say bad unbelievably weird real bad yeah didn't look good to me no the optics are horrible and if i were the parent of one of those extras at the party feel like oh i'm so sorry an adult man showed up at the party and and y'all were just chilling with the adult man a necklace that a teen girl left at his house overnight i'm confused what's happening yeah please explain it slowly i need you to explain it slowly before i get mad explain it slowly it's so like because there is a line between i don't know like i wanted to see a bright eyes concert when i was 14 and i didn't want my friends to know that i wasn't allowed to go by myself

because they were like 16 or 17 and so my dad got a ticket and then stood in the back incognito mode for the whole concert and then waited while I went to a diner with my friends and then I like met up with him and went home and you're like that's it's one of my my dad's the best that is like very very exceptional I love that story right and and also just like my boomer dad had a whole bright eyes concert yeah like and he was like on the back wall with other parents who were almost definitely doing the same thing but yeah like and he was like on the back wall with other parents who were almost definitely doing the same thing but it was like that was like clutch parenting but then there's a line where it's like if connor oberst of bright eyes says hey 14 year old girl

let's go to a party your dad should intervene and say no adult man you're not gonna hang out with a child at a minimum right you're right and then you're like your child will hate you for years but it's what you have to do it's what you have to do that is what it is lola's dad is so invested in being mr cool dad that he is actively endangering her so much in the space of like 48 hours several times yeah there's a point where they're considering walking down the alley or something to go see where stew is he's like passed out in the trash can in the alley yeah and lola and ella are considering walking down the alley and i'm like where the hell is lola's dad right now if i'm watching my child consider following a grown man down an alley i don't care if I'm supposed to be incognito.

You're not walking down the fucking alley. There were so many times I'm like, you're negligent. What the hell is going on with you? Are you okay? Even the teen girls are concerned. They're like, this seems dangerous. And then Ella's like, I'm not going. And Lola's like, yes, we are.

I was like, no, I'm not. And they say, oh, we're with an adult referring to stew wolf stew wolf so what is happening yeah we'll talk more about this in a bit but yeah that does definitely all happen anyway so stew showing up at the party and giving this necklace back shows to everyone that lola wasn't lying about meeting stew and so now it's Carla's turn to be humiliated yeah but because Lola is nice she's a nice girl she's not a mean girl she extends an olive branch to Carla and then the movie ends with Lola and Stu slow dancing at the party but then stew turns into sam and now sam and lola are dancing and she's like in voiceover saying well now i have a boyfriend because now i'm a star

and now i can make time for romance the end sure the unbelievably confusing the fact that they end on sam we're, who is he? Yeah. Right. Couldn't remember his name. Was like, who am I looking at? I don't know who that is. Let's take a quick break and we will come back to discuss further.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcasts and we're back can we just start with sam let's get this out of the way like just not a necessary person for the movie no and i was frustrated i feel like i well this is like so common in movies that are marketed at teenagers especially like teen girls and femmes it's just like unnecessary boyfriend character uh and it still happens i don't think with the same amount of frequency but it definitely still happens and again it's like we've talked about this on the show a million times. If a or like trying to understand each other that it's just like i've never seen i don't know i think this might be the most obvious one from this era where it's like who is this guy yeah to the point where it seems like all the scenes were already written and then someone was like wait we need a love interest who's her age and a classmate of hers because the only other one we have right now is this creepy adult musician man.

So then they were just like, okay, there's a guy named Sam. We can stick him in this scene. We can stick him in this scene. We can stick him in the third scene. And that's his character. He'll steal the dress. When I was thinking about it, I was like, ooh, I bet in the first the first draft with this movie ella steals the dress or like literally anyone else who makes sense yeah it's on brand yeah so on brand totally because i i really like the like sort of dual storylines

between like lola and ella's friendship and how they like affect each other and also lola and carla's rivalry um like those are the sort of driving forces. Like you could argue that if I mean, I guess like Lola will be a drama queen no matter what. But it's like it's when she meets Carla that like this becomes her purpose in life is to show up this girl. Certainly. It's like Carla's effect on both Lola and Ella is very felt and very funny to me. Ella is so goody two shoes, like by the book until Carla says something that irritates her. And it happens a couple of times throughout the film.

And every time she just turns into Lola, like for a brief second, she's like, yeah, we are going to be at that concert. Yeah, that's it. Exactly. You know, loved it. And it is so entertaining yeah they're very broad characters but it feels like grounded enough in reality of like making a friend that just brings something out in you that you're not comfortable enough to do like i definitely had friends like that when i was in high school where i was generally pretty shy but around the

right person i would be loud i would be obnoxious because you just feel like well this person can pull it off let me give it a shot yeah you're there like energy rubs off on you they empower you to like have more confidence that kind of thing which is like an interesting thing to examine and that is the focus of the movie but it also begs the question why is this weird romantic storyline between lola and sam wedged in because it's like barely there to begin with i don't know to me it's more annoying versus the romantic storyline between lola and stew wolf is like straight up troubling scary do we want to go over there do we want to go friendships where do we want to go let's just get the men out of the way am i right and then we'll go to the girlies my favorite yeah

the stew wolf stuff is just like straight up predatory like in a way that i'm like oh the movie seems semi-aware that sam is pointless because he's just thrown in there at random points i don't think that the movie is aware that stew is an absolute creep in the way that he very obviously is if you think about it for one second yeah the movie frames this is like yeah like they can't really be together. But let's let Lola have this like fantasy moment where she gets to dance with this guy and hang out with him. She's like in his bedroom wearing his clothes at one point. Just like nasty stuff. And the movie frames it as like, isn't this such a cool fantasy that she gets to live out? Which like a lot of teen girls would probably feel that way because they, they don't know that it's,

or, you know, especially in this era where this kind of shit was so normalized where it's like, yeah, that would be awesome if I was like 15 hanging out with a man 10 to 15 years older than me. That was just so normalized but you know today we're like yikes and gross and illegal and predatory well that's the thing that is like this

very misguided choice was made in an attempt like coming off of like a huge boy band era and craze to give some sort of wish fulfillment to like mostly tweens because it's like that's who's watching it with movies like this you subtract three years from the intended audience yeah like tweens that would love to meet their idols from boy bands girl bands whoever like they're fans of and i think that there's a way to give that wish fulfillment in a really fun way that doesn't go like creepy wattpad fan fiction which is like the way that this goes i agree there's this actual decom uh stuck in the suburbs where there's like a pop star who's also older than them and it kind of gives that wish fulfillment without the level of creepiness that we get in this film.

That's true. Oh, we should cover that someday. I really loved that one. I think an easy fix is just to make Stu also a teenager. Like that's not unheard of for there to be like guys and boy bands who are like, I don't know, 16, 17. 17, yeah. And then maybe like age lola up to just make them age appropriate for each other and she can still like meet him and see that he's like

a mess or he's not you know this poetic genius that she's thought and that's off-putting to her but even if that was the case where he wasn't like an adult predator and they were like age appropriate for each other, the way this pans out is really weird because like she talks to him at this party and realizes that he's not who she thought. She's disappointed that, you know, he's not the way he seems. And so she leaves like kind of out of disgust. And I don't know if it's that like his drunkenness is like the most off-putting thing to her i don't really know but she leaves and she doesn't want to hang out with him anymore but then when he comes back to the party and he has gotten sober she's like wow now we can dance and it's like well what about i don't know it just like i wasn't quite sure yeah what was happening and this is

maybe getting really into the weeds this is a little thing because it's like ultimately stew is a creep no matter which way you spin it because it's like either he's their age and there's a romantic connection or he's not their age and it's clearly a friendship you just have to make a choice yeah for a kid's movie but i also felt like the way that they presented his addiction problems were super broad and fanfic-y feeling where like it was just very like you're a drunk and like and making that seem like where it's like two things are true here with the stew wolf character specifically where it's like they both choose to make him this like mismatched predatory character and they also choose to talk about what we later learn was a serious addiction problem in a very like shamey

way that they just could have used a second draft on the way that that character in general is handled because i think that there's a way you can have the pop idol who's a mess treated, but it just felt a little undercooked in a way that didn't serve the target audience, I guess. Also, Stu cites the reason that he decided to get sober. He's like, I did it because Lola, you told me I was a drunk loser and I didn't like that. So you're the reason I got sober and it's like it's like i fixed you wish fulfillment too that and yeah it's like oh i can't lose this wonderful

person who i like so i have to get sober for them which is similar to like the way that when they reunite at carla's party it's very much framed cinematically as like the romantic interests are reuniting and like the music is swelling and it's like he puts the necklace on her. But then it's more confusing when it changes to the boring yet age appropriate. That comes out of nowhere. Men in general, I feel like don't really have a role in this. They don't. Yeah, get them out of there. Yeah. general i feel like don't really have a role in this yeah get them out of there yeah that tells me that the writers did know that that was weird and they had to change it to sam at the end because

they're like okay we're gonna she's a drama queen maybe she's imagining this right it was so bizarre yeah you're totally right like switching him to the age appropriate person is sort of like an admission of like but she obviously can't end up with this guy yeah and you're like well what if you just wrote first of all this movie doesn't really need a love interest but if it's 2003 and you need one then just make the pop star age appropriate question mark make him sam's age exactly why do we need a sam we don't know i think that sam's gonna drag down her acting ambitions and she should really think twice he put her dress under the hood of a car do you know how angry i would be if you put my dress

under the greasy hood of a car what are you good for sam and he's so smug about it i'm like what do you think you've done that's so good like yeah i'm pissed i don't like sam no i don't like boo and i hate stew yeah all right shall we talk about the gals well let's talk about dad oh right i think we almost basically just covered that in the recap but the dad i don't mind that he's there but i disagree with every single choice he makes. I guess that's all I'll say. Yeah, sure. That sounds right.

Cute dog, though. Good for him. Lovely dog. Cute dog. Okay, so aside from those unnecessary male characters, what we have otherwise is, I mean, there were a few, like, you know, teen girly movie tropes happening. We've got a lot of like clothes trying on montages. We do have a centering of female relationships, whether those are friendships or like adversaries. Yeah.

We've got different kind of like, oh, they're scenes at a mall, you know, scenes where they're putting on makeup. But those are like goofy and like never really a makeover scene. Anyway, we've got some tropes and we've got some subversions of tropes. I thought that the friendship between Lola and Ella was more nuanced than a lot of friendships i've seen in teen girl movies where so movies like this usually involve a brief falling out like around the low point around the end of act two of the movie of the friends like the two friends some truth gets revealed or some fight happens where they have a falling out and sometimes it feels like very contrived and it's based on like well girls be petty trope so they obviously have to fight for no reason but this one i thought was like very interesting where ella learns that lola had lied so many l sounds lied

to ella about lola's father dying she tries to brush it off and then says well you know i had to seem more interesting but also i had to defend my mom from your snooty parents being judgmental about my mom being a single mom, which might be a separate conversation about like the kind of attitudes towards single moms presented by various characters in this movie. But yeah, but I also feel like that awareness was like baked into the movie where Lola is like, really angry that her mom is being judged in that way when it seems like the only fair point made is the very early 2000s appropriative chopsticks in the hair now I think Ella's mom accidentally made a good point there I don't think that that was why she

said it though right but yeah I appreciated that I think it's like a general good thing that instead of what might be more realistic is like hearing that from another parent and internalizing it and feeling shame and confusion about it about your own parent like Lola is like no fuck you like yeah you're not going to talk about my parent that way and I also like that that presents a more kind of nuanced dynamic between lola and her mom because they're always in conflict but if someone fucks with her mom she's like not gonna hear it i love it for sure yeah yeah and then once this lie gets revealed and they have this argument about it and they make up and Lola earnestly apologizes for lying and you know Ella says promise you'll never lie again she's like I promise but I also think that Ella owes

Lola an apology for like being complicit in her parents judginess absolutely of Lola and her family which Ella never apologizes for that but they they make up. And Ella says that, you know, she was miserable until Lola came to New Jersey. And before that, Ella thought that she just had to do whatever she thought she was supposed to do and whatever people wanted her to do and to never question anything. But because of Lola, like she felt brave enough to try to be different and also I was like does Ella have a crush on Lola I was kind of getting vibes anyway I would believe it I feel like Alison Pill while not a queer woman herself that I'm aware of played many queer coded characters during this time so maybe it's also just like what we associate with this character I love Alison Powell she's so fun true and I like that I mean in 2003 it's going to be kept ambiguous whether you like it or not and especially because

what they initially bond over is like this band that they're both really into and it's just like this intense friendship between girls and we don't really know how they feel beyond that but it's like an intense teenage friendship and i love seeing those and it yeah i felt like where apologies are so fumbled in these kinds of movies it felt like it was done in like a more sincere way than i was expecting i liked it i also appreciated that they become fast friends based on their love of sid arthur and then there's a scene that reminded me of like when malfoy goes up to harry potter when they first get to hogwarts sorry to be making a Harry Potter reference right now. But Malfoy's like, hey there, you don't want to fall in with the wrong crowd.

You know, you want to make friends with the right people. I can help you there. And then Harry's like, I can tell the wrong crowd from myself. Thanks. And then he becomes friends with Ron and Hermione instead. Carla like Malfoy's over to Lola. And she's like, you don't want to hang out with Ella. She dresses like a politician's wife.

She's a dweeb. You have so much potential. I can help you be cool. Which is also extremely like the plot of Mean Girls. Mean Girls. Yeah. But what if Lindsay Lohan made the opposite decision? Exactly. I think Megan Fox would be great in Mean Girls. Yeah. But what if Lindsay Lohan made the opposite decision? Exactly. I think Megan visibly mean and awful so no thanks i don't really

care about being popular like i'll make my own way and i thought that was just a very nice way for the story to play out i liked it i thought it was lovely and i mean i guess yeah the other main conflict between women although we have Miss Begoli who is you know a very like broad character but I guess this is like grading on a curved scale but she wasn't treated as badly as I would expect her to be treated true yeah so I kind of don't have an issue with it like she was obviously very goofy but also like she's good at her job she wasn't like completely i don't know i feel like sometimes adult characters in kids movies and this makes sense but they're just treated as like on another planet like so goofy and she's like goofy but also not grounded like

i would say like goofy but ground perfect she was perfect it was carol kane with the tightest perm anyone's ever seen like just really good stuff I laughed out loud repeatedly at her when she does the oh like that I laughed so hard it feels like good teacher representation yeah totally I think that she needs to learn to grow a bit of a spine, though, because she lets Carla steamroll her in the adaptation of Pygmalion that they're doing. And then she like was, again, laughing along with Carla against Lola toward the end. I just can't be mad at her. I just feel like teachers should be allowed to drink at school one day a week and they should be allowed to laugh at their students sometimes unless they are given a raise wait there's that one part in the auditorium where lola asked miss bagoli if the adaptation was her

idea because carla had been touting it as her own idea and miss bagoli's like of course it's my idea why would you ask me if it's my idea or not and like it's unclear who was lying there to me and i think it was carla right because it could have been miss bagoli who was like i rewrote this whole thing i think it was miss bagoli's idea i interpreted it as carla bullying off screen miss bagoli i see how you could get to do that. But you're right. It is open. It could have been the other way around.

Yeah. Because her and Lindsay Lohan's character exchanged this look as if like Carla's uncomfortable that she has seen right now that Lola is certainly not above a lie herself. It is so wild. I feel like in some ways it does make sense to me that Carla and Lola don't like each other because they are very similar in positive and also deeply negative ways where you're like, yeah, they're basically the same character, but we are just told to like one of them. Right. Where they both are like rich white girls who are into theater and ddr and telling lies like they are doing the same thing and they like the same band and have a lot of unearned arrogance yes yes so it's like they're basically the same character but this kind of this is not a fully baked thought i feel like it's been expanded on more thoughtfully in other places but just how like megan fox is positioned especially in her early movies we talked about

this a million years ago in our transformers episode but she's more positioned as the girl next door i think in her early roles which include this before this i think she was in she was the bully in a m-Kate and Ashley movie. And I think that the way that Megan Fox was treated repeatedly in her early career, especially, is too pretty or too conventionally pretty to be sympathetic to. And you have to hate her

because she is too pretty to be quote unquote relatable and in a way that is like ends up becoming cruel to Megan Fox in a way that I think that especially in the 2000s felt like women frequently joined in on and so it's just like a dog pile from all sides and this role I like I don't think that this role like stands out in her treatment of that way, but it feels kind of consistent in the way she was treated. Definitely. Also, I think there's always or often not always the main protagonist generally has light hair and the mean girl generally is brunette with dark features going on. That's like the early animated Disney movie formula, too. Exactly. True. Blonde princesses and dark hair.

Everyone's white, of course. Yeah, right. Of course. The villains have black hair. Right. Absolutely. And I wonder if this is like if this was originally a DCOM, Disney Channel original movie with a big budget and Lindsay Lohan, who was really popping at the time. And so they gave it a theatrical release and called it a real movie.

I read that this role in a way that I'm like, wow, there were three teenage girls at this time, allegedly, and they were Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes and Hilary Duff. Yeah. This part was originally written for Hilary Duff. Yes, I saw that. And then given to Lindsay Lohan. I think a smarter move. I don't know that Hilary Duff can play... Dramatic?

Drama, arrogance. Yeah. Like, she's very pure in her screen presence, at least. Yeah, lift every voice. And still now, I, like, follow her on Instagram. Oh, my God. Or raise every voice. I don't remember.

Yeah, that's where i roll wait someone in this movie is in raise your voice i think it might be sam sure i think sam may also be the boy from raise your voice yeah anyways it doesn't matter that movie is dog shit it was real bad it's so bad i saw that one in theaters and i remember leaving like what i was a kid and i was like this was really bad it was also like there's i just remember that it's really sad yes in addition to being really bad and you're like what are we doing here absolutely anyways i'm glad the part went to lindsay lohan but yes it's so broadly written that you're like the bully character we don't get an insight into her really

at all to the point where like you were saying sequia, like it's hard to know when she's telling the truth or not when we always know whether Lola is telling the truth or not. So with the Carla character, I mean, this movie gives us a very familiar storyline of teen girls being mean and or competitive with each other. We've seen it a million times in movies. And this extends not just to teen girls, but like adult women as well. It's a very familiar narrative device. We've seen it a million times. We've talked about it on the show a million times. And as we've discussed, this trope doesn't come from nowhere.

Like teen girls and women can be cruel to each other in real life. It's just a matter of like, does the story recognize and contextualize why this happens? are conditioned to think that they have to compete against each other for the limited spots that girls and women are allowed to occupy. This movie does not dive too deeply into this, but I do think it does a decent job examining that like Carla, you know, the Megan Fox character clearly feels deeply threatened by Lola and her talent and her looks and her status. And when Lola doesn't want to be friends with Carla, she turns on Lola because Carla is a very insecure person. Yeah. And insecurity is a very common experience for teens in general, but especially teen girls who are taught that their value comes from very specific things, especially how physically attractive they are, how much like social status they have, things like that. Lola is also insecure, which is, I think, why she lies and embellishes a lot. She's more concerned about like seeming interesting, but they're both,

you know, like experiencing similar emotions and situations. They just handle it differently. But again, the movie isn't providing a lot of like heavy analysis on these things, but it's presenting them in a way that feels authentic more or less to me at least which you know not all movies do that a lot of them are just like well i'm a male screenwriter and i've seen teen girls be really mean to each other and i don't know why

but i've seen it happen here's me just throwing shit at the wall yeah it does feel like as goofy as it can be it does feel kind of like clear to me that women wrote this movie or had a high creative hand in it because even at the end i mean it's like again very movie-y but the fact that like Lola makes a gesture to Carla like pulls her out of the water fountain it's like okay so this movie's like internal code is not that women hate each other forever because I feel like if it was like a very general dude coded movie you know Carla would be tossed off a cliff or whatever but this one is like there's a road to reconciliation for these characters and great for them whatever um i wanted to quickly shout out the fact that this movie is written and directed by women both white women we have a

director sarah sugarman who this is the only movie of hers that i recognized but she's got a whole career she's an actor and also a director and then gail parent who is iconic to me i really love her she started as a writer on the carol burnett show way back in the day and then she co-created one of my favorite shows ever mary hartman mary Hartman, which I would recommend to anyone listening. It's like, it was a Norman Lear, I think, helmed show that came out in the 70s that was a parody of soap operas, basically a feminist soap opera parody about 70s housewives and how shitty they were treated. And sort of general quote-unquote housewife character who starts cheating on her loser husband amongst other things it's the best

i love it yeah she's a legend to me and then when i found out that the writer of this movie was into her 60s i'm like yeah i believe it yeah maybe that's why missugoli was so good. Right? Yeah. This movie is also adapted from a book of I think the same name written by an American novelist, Diane Sheldon. So yeah, the creative voices behind this story are for the girls. It's for girls by girls, but it's also for everyone who wants to enjoy it. Definitely. So Gil Parent also wrote on Golden Girls and she also wrote Cadet Kelly. So let's just continue to give her her flowers. We love her.

My type of lady. Right? She's the coolest. I also feel, this is kind of separate, that Disney wanted to give lindsey lohan a music career real bad because she has this song at the end of confession of a teenage drama queen she also has a couple songs in freaky friday i'm sick oh yes and then we had rumors same year rumors it might be the next year rumors is her first single honestly i'm like no with all due respect to hillary duff if hillary duff had a music career

why didn't lindsey lowe yeah good question and i kind of wonder if the way that she was treated in the media interfered with it because it's like most disney slash nickelodeon music careers it's mostly like an extension of marketing that we love to this day i feel like there's a few exceptions to that but we don't need to get into it can we talk about carla's two mean girl friends it'll be a quick conversation because i was like what is there to say we don't really ever hear them talk but But obviously, Carla is like, you know, the queen bee. She's the Regina George type. This character in movies often has two friends who follow her around. They barely speak. I feel like often one of them is a white girl and one of them is a girl of color. In this movie, the black girl who is friends with Carla, I would say is on screen less than the white friend because like she's not at the after

party, Stu's after party toward the end, whereas the white friend is. And I think she doesn't speak at all, whereas the white friend has at least one line. I mean, neither of them get any narrative significance here. But I feel like the white girl is favored a bit more as far as a few lines of dialogue and more screen time. And it just got me thinking about how this type of sidekick mean girl character like the different versions we've seen I mean in this movie it's obviously like they don't have characters but speaking of she's all that there's a similar situation with the Gabrielle Union character where she's like one of the mean

girl sidekicks she's the black one and then the other one is like the white girl but unlike most of those archetypal characters she has a personality she has dialogue and she even has an arc where she becomes friends with the like female protagonist by the end of the movie so i was just like well that would have been nice to see or would have been nice to see you know yeah anyone in this movie who wasn't a white person given any narrative significance but yeah oops we forgot to do that yeah and i feel like that is like so often built into or like tacitly justified by a class which also does not make sense if you've ever been to a middle class upper middle class community like they are still predominantly white but they're not entirely white the way that these movies

present them and also it's like it's a movie it's fake there's like lindsey lohan's dad fake dying in a cartoon accident you can diversify this boring new Jersey suburb as much as you like. Also, just quick mention of Lola's hunger strike, where she's like emulating Gandhi's hunger strike. But like the clothes she's wearing, the music that's playing in this scene, it's all very like her appropriating like vague indian culture basically so there's this book that's like a classic book siddhartha which is i have a hard time with this band because i keep wanting to call the band siddhartha but it's called siddhartha but if i'm not mistaken and i very well could be think Siddhartha, the main character of the book, goes on a hunger strike. I could have made that up.

But I was like, I wonder if they know that they're making that. If that is the case, I wonder if they're doing that on purpose. Either way, it's wrong. But I'm wondering what they were thinking. But I would be curious, like, what the logic justification was oh interesting okay it's like see we're we don't read books and so we wouldn't know this is this is really helpful I read it in high school who's to say what actually happened in that book brave I mean the whole thing is clearly like she's. She's a drama queen. She's gonna, like, go to the extreme, which, like, could mean what ends up being a fake hunger strike because we find out that she's eating, like, Domino's pizza the whole time. But if she's gonna make this dramatic choice by going on a hunger strike, she doesn't also need to appropriate another culture while she's doing it but i feel like that was one of the few examples of like

like a very dated problematic choice like that in this movie because like 2004 was the peak for a lot of these and you wouldn't see it as much in a disney movie or a movie targeted toward younger people but like this was also the peak of like let's take homophobia transphobia racism sexism etc and just like make that what every joke in a movie derives from yeah yeah so well and i also liked that it's a subtle theme in this movie but just the concept of names that just like this is the name i go by and at the beginning of the movie her mom does not respect that at the end of the movie her mom does respect that and i appreciate that that was like taken uh and i don't think that i i mean i don't know it doesn't seem like the movie was intending much more than just acceptance from a parent. But that's a broad enough theme that it like is ladybird and then at the beginning the parent is like i refuse to acknowledge that and at the end there's motion there and i think that that is like

a nice thing to see for parents and for kids in a movie like that because i'm sure as many parents saw this movie as kids whether voluntarily or not yeah Does anyone have anything else they would like to discuss about the movie? Why did the backup dancers have blue hair? That's the last thing I have to say. Oh, in the play? I thought it was something about Pygmalion that I didn't understand. I don't think so.

I just was like, well, why do they look like the guy from Team Rocket in Pokemon? Yeah. And they all look like him. Well, they're modernizing Pygmalion and modern equals blue hair. Pokemon. Blue hair.

Yeah. It was wild. I guess I don't need to know, but I just would like to know what the thought was. Would like to know. No judgment. No. None. but i just would like to know what the thought was would like to know no judgment no well this movie does pass the bechdel test yeah a lot a lot not when lola is lying about her father dying because she's talking about a man they do also talk about like stew wolf and sam some but there's lots of conversations about the play and clothes and stuff like that between many combinations of characters so yeah heftily passing

they say um but what about the most important metric in the whole world oh my gosh are you talking about our famous nipple scale in which we rate the movie i don't regret it i don't regret calling that one bit no regrets on a scale of zero to five nipples based on examining the movie through an intersectional feminist lens i will give this oof maybe three maybe two and a half i think it's doing some interesting things as far as relationships between teen girls go i think it's clear that the creative minds behind this story were women drawing from their experiences, possibly, at the very least, have a better idea of what it is to be a teen girl than the men who often write these stories about like female characters being in competition with each other and or being friends with each other. Because men also don't understand what female friendship looks like a lot of the time. So I thought like the nuances in those relationships were interesting, including the mother daughter relationship, although that's not super focused on, but I enjoyed that relationship. Two romantic interests are like best case scenario, annoying and unnecessary. Worst case scenario, predatory and disgusting.

So that takes several nipplage points off. Yeah. Rewrite it or skip it. Yeah. Also not a diverse cast in any way. Lots of straight, cis, white people. so i guess it's going to be like a split down the middle for me 2.5 nipples i will give all of them to the dog perfect thank you yeah i'll go the same right down the middle i think that you're getting more than your

average early aughts teen girl movie in this movie but that doesn't mean that you're getting more than your average early aughts teen girl movie in this movie, but that doesn't mean that you're really seeing that much. I appreciate the friendship dynamics that are a little more nuanced. I think that, you know, representation of women behind the camera is very rare for most of these movies. And again, like this movie is helmed and stars white girls and women and there's clearly no effort or thought into anything but upper class white girl experiences which is this movie does not move the needle in this genre at all because so I mean that's so teen movie that's so decom like so much teen girl media is entrenched in white girls of this class specifically and the sort of

problems slash non-problems that they have but I do think you can feel that this movie was written by people who have some understanding of what teen girls grow through and their friendships the intensity of their friendships the intensity of like the things that they care about whether it's rational or not in a way that didn't feel like even when it was intense and dramatic and like lindsey lohan wearing a funeral dress to school when the band broke up which we should have given more attention to that episode so good i that's one of the things i always remember it's both really dramatic and goofy but it's like not making fun of her in a way that i feel like that's a really hard balance to strike without having

lived that in some way yourself i thought i was going to be really annoyed by like the movie in general and especially by the drama queen character because like I don't want to see someone being like irrationally dramatic all the time like that's very annoying to me but Lindsay Lohan's playing it so I'm like oh like yes she's being dramatic about a lot of things but in a way that's like very funny and her like monologues about certain things are like extremely well written and I'm like if did you just improvise that because that was poetry Gail Parent like she's a really good writer I really love everyone should watch Mary Hartman Mary Hartman it's on whatever that thing is that isn't YouTube daily motion for some reason,

who knows why, but highly recommend it. It's really, really good. So yeah, I'll split it down the middle because all of the men are creepy and unnecessary. And so I will give one to Gail Parent. I will give one to Lindsay Lohan. And then I guess, Oh, I guess I'm gonna split the last quarter nipples pretty cruel but Alison Pill and Megan Fox I mean yeah two icons and I'm oh Carol Kane needs to ah I'll give one of mine to Carol Kane and I'll get the dog one and a half nice can't believe you've ranked dog above Carol Kane history will remember thatlin sorry that's just me being dramatic sequoia what do you think i agree i was leaning 2.53 so i'll stay in that 2.5 range i really like that it makes teen girls it makes it clear that they are worthy of redemption and

just because you do something bad once or a few times doesn't mean that you are bad and that's who you are as a person. And I feel like a lot of the time that's not the message that teen girls get in media. So grateful for that. And then, of course, the men are unnecessary and creepy and weird and gross and disgusting. And so that definitely deducts some points from there. I'm going to give one full nipple to Megan Fox because she, as we talked about earlier, has been mistreated because of the way

that she's been typecast. I will give one to Lindsay Lohan because she's Lindsay Lohan and she deserves. And the half nipple can go to Carol kane yeah yeah she's great like actually fantastic yeah considering moving it up to three so she can have an entire nipple herself whatever you want yeah yeah well sequoia thank you so much for joining us this has been a treat this is so much fun where can people check out your social media, check out your podcast? For sure.

Thank you so much for having me, first of all. And thank you so much for indulging one of my teen child moments. Anytime. It was great. It was a great refresher to watch it again. You can find me across social media at Sequoia B. Holmes. You can find my podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts, including YouTube. And you can find it on social at BPLPPod.

Awesome. Amazing. patreon at patreon.com slash Bechtelcast where you get two bonus episodes every month plus access to the back catalog of like 150 bonus episodes, fun themes, lots of decoms over there, lots of good stuff. I wouldn't believe. I mean, we also just,

this is not a decom movie, but decom coded. We just did What a Girl Wants. So you can hop on over there for that and more. And you can get our merch at tpublic.com slash the Bechtel cast. And with that, does anyone want to go end up with a really perfunctory, boring end of movie boyfriend? Because that's how this movie ends. No, but i do want to

star in eliza rocks and sing with blue-haired people behind me i want to be one of the blue-haired people i'm not aiming too high nice yeah that was the part that you actually wanted all along that's the most interesting role actually i'm really getting into the story yeah yeah yeah okay bye bye hey everybody this is matt rogers and bowen yang we've got some exciting news Actually, I'm really getting into the story. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, bye. Bye. Hey, everybody. This is Matt Rogers. And Bowen Yang.

We've got some exciting news for you. You know we're always bringing you the best guests, right? Well, this week we're taking it to the next level. The one, the only, Catherine Han is joining us on Lost Culture East. That's right. The queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture. Don't miss Katherine Hahn on Las Culturistas.

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