How was this not a box office hit? You mean to tell me that people didn’t want to pay to see Hannah Montana take a metaphorical dump on their IQ levels for an hour and a half?

I recently started up a catalog of my reviews in order of the scores I gave them, and today I was looking over the list and realizing that I didn’t have very much on the lower end of the spectrum.  Of course this makes sense in the sense that I, like most people, tend to prefer watching movies that I have at least some small chance of liking and as such I usually am at least somewhat satisfied with the result.  In any case though, I thought it might be nice to change it up and watch something that I pretty much knew that I wasn’t going to like.  Then I remember, “Hey, didn’t Miley Cyrus do a movie a while back?  I can see myself hating that!”, and hate it I did.  There are many films out there that are so bad that they’re good, and many that are bad but have at least a few redeeming aspects.  LOL is a fine example of a movie that falls right at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley between those two catagories, and having forced myself through its 30 minutes of the 97 minute run time I am very tempted to say that I’ve found a prime candidate for my Least Favorite Movie of All Time.

 The Plot

Boundary issues up the Wazzu with these two

Fuck it, there is none.  Lola (Miley Cyrus) runs around being a stereotypical brainless teenager with her other brainless teenage friends, while her mother (Demi Moore) does little more than spew out more cliches than the Panda Express fortune cookie factory.  That’s pretty much the gist of it.

The Players

For the first time ever, still NOT a better love story than Twilight

Once again nothing redeeming here.  People who have seen previous Demi Moore movies might possibly consider her one of the worst actresses in Hollywood today, but now we can at least rest assured that she can only take the silver medal in that category.  The gold unsurprisingly goes to Miley Cyrus here, who might fit in among the other half-assed “actors” on the set of Hannah Montana but upon being confronted with a somewhat “serious” role like this she makes it perfectly clear that she couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag.  By the way, please excuse the excess of quotation marks, seeing terrible movies like this tends to make me bitchier than usual and results in vastly increased amounts of cynicism.

Two Girls One Cup is old news, I want to see reaction videos to LOL

Basically each and every character is some vague amalgamation of teenage stereotypes.  Whenever the primary concern isn’t about getting boys to like them or talking trash about people behind their backs, the most serious things ever get is along the lines of “Golly Gee, my parents are so concerned with me getting good grades that they fail to see how good of a musician I am.”

The Writing

Now we know how they got this script, lucky numbers and all

While the acting is spectacularly bad, the writing is so equally awful that had Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence taken the lead roles they still would have had no chance at creating a passable movie.  As I said above, 90% of the dialogue in the movie is either heavily recycled from other films while the remaining 10% is just so unbelievably terrible that I truly believe that an actual 16 year old girl could have done better.  Here are some of the gems that the script was dotted with (All exact quotations by the way)

“This is sooo not a perfect day”

“Oh my god, Dad is totally hooking up with mom again”

and my personal favorite (from a guy, mind you)

“I’m not going to [have sex with you], I respect you too much!”

The Verdict:  1/10 Participation Point

Ermahgerd, Hehnner Mehntehner!

When I started watching this, I expected it to be horrible but nothing could have prepared me for just how bad it was.  To illustrate my point, here are the five steps of watching LOL:

1.  Resignation to the fact that this is actually happening

2.  Repeated rolling of the eyes paired with intense confusion

3. Gut-busting unintentional laughter

4.  Annoyance building to utter madness

5.  Saying enough is enough and sighing with relief as you hit “Stop” on your remote

I will admit that there was a brief period of time in which I almost actually enjoyed laughing at how terrible this movie was.  From the 10 to the 15 minute marks I almost felt like I was witnessing a sort of beautiful disaster along the lines of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, which stood out by being so perfect in its terribleness that I literally could not think of any way in which it could be worse.  The only problem was that “Friday” was only 3 minutes long, and as LOL dragged on past the 30 minute mark I found the cut-and-paste lines and overdone angst to be less of a source of laughter and more of an ongoing screech of cinematic nails on a chalkboard.  Bottom line if you are trying to torture intelligent human beings, force them to watch this movie.  Otherwise the only reason I would suggest watching this is if you wanted to make Miley Cyrus’ music career look amazing in comparison.

Stay tuned for my review later on tomorrow of a film I actually plan on liking, Beasts of the Southern Wild