“Living Lohan” / Stacey Nosek
TV Reviews | May 29, 2008 | Comments (56)
I didn’t want to watch this show. Honest, I didn’t. I even said so much on Pajiba Love earlier this week, calling it “rancid horseshit.” But thanks to a sick compulsion which makes me do things like TiVO episodes of “Cheaters” and be a gossip blogger, when it came down to it ultimately I was powerless to the alluring siren song of “Living Lohan.” And now that I’ve gotten to watch I have to say that my previous statement did a serious injustice to the good name of rancid horseshit. This show is so awful and painful to watch it should be flat out against the law. Saying that Dina Lohan is a “bad” mother is like saying that George W. Bush is a “bad” president. Not that it’s not true mind you, but grossly understated when there are far more apt descriptors like vindictive, conniving, manipulative, incompetent, irresponsible, exploitative and just plain fucking stupid, which coincidentally can all be used to characterize either Bush or Lohan. And not totally unlike the president, Dina Lohan also indignantly vows to protect and defend her daughters from the corruptions of society despite being the primary fucking reason those corruptions exist in the first place. It’s a mind-numbing, catch-22 situation, and unfortunately the big losers here are her clearly misguided offspring.
Speaking of those clearly misguided offspring, the other stars of The Dina Lohan Show are the “14 going on 30” Ali, whose aspirations of stardom are supposedly the central subject matter of “Living Lohan,” and Ali’s younger brother who is pretty much irrelevant to the show, so we’ll just call him Boy Lohan. At any rate, the real central theme of the show seems to be Dina’s omnipresent conflict with the media. Aided by her assistant/henchman, (henchissistant!) Dina constantly scours the tabloids and gossip sites for somebody “she can sue,” several times referring to it as a game, as she’s obviously relishing every moment of it. In the opening scene she states that “they better not start on Ali like this, or there’s gonna be war.” Let’s see. So what would be a giant goddamn step in not getting the tabloids to start on Ali? Maybe hold off on thrusting her into the spotlight within a year of her first menstruation? Or maybe not doing a fucking reality show showboating this desperate appeal for fame in the first place? Because, really, I haven’t been given one good reason why the tabloids shouldn’t fuck with Ali Lohan at this point — aside from her young age — which if you ask me is canceled out by the plastic surgery she’s blatantly had done on her face. Really Dinasaur, throw me a damn bone here. I’m trying to understand. Additionally, Mommy Lohan states that she’s like a lion protecting her cubs. So … Are lions one of the species of animal who will eat their young when they feel threatened?
In spite of being exploited within an inch of her life, Ali Lohan still isn’t the sympathetic character you’d expect, and comes off every bit as entitled and fame whorey as her harpy of a mother, claiming to want to be just like her “role model,” sister Lindsay. The fact that Dinasaur encourages her daughter’s desire to be like her sexpot, thrice rehabbed, toilet-careered sister tells you all you need to know about any intrinsic mothering skills — or more accurately, lack thereof. Since Ali has no discernible talent to speak of, she’s going the “recording artist” route, in which talent has been proven to be a secondary commodity to having a famous-ish face to slap on the cover. (See: Brooke Hogan, Paris Hilton.) In the premiere episode, Dina and Ali are trying to pick songs provided by her crappy label for an upcoming album. Ali brats that she doesn’t like the songs the label picked for her, and instead of slapping some sense into her daughter (whose singing wouldn’t even get past the dud round on “American idol”) Dina huffily informs the label lackey that “[Ali] certainly isn’t going to sing a song, that as an artist, she doesn’t believe in.” Which makes sense, actually. So maybe Dina should tell her spoiled ass of a daughter that, as an artist, she should write her own fucking songs because that’s another thing “artists” are supposed to do.
Towards the end of the premiere episode, Henchisstant discovers that Ali’s “producer” Jeremy, who her mother met online after he randomly IM’ed her, (hello? is this thing on?) has been telling the tabloids he’s dating Lindsay despite never having met the more famous Lohan. Naturally Dinasaur is completely shocked by this betrayal, as her hunger for money and fame is so great that it never occurred to her that some dude she met on the internet might not have the best interest of her family in mind. The saddest part is when Ali confronts Jeremy — who is clearly full of shit — telling him that she knows he’s full of shit because he’s “looking all around” and not directly at her. That a 14-year-old kid would have that nuanced of bullshit detection just boggles me. So having witnessed only 22 minutes of The Lohan Life, for the first time ever I perhaps have an iota of sympathy for Lindsay Lohan. When I try to imagine what it must have been like with not one but two parental Lohans growing up, all I can think of is Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock’s characters in Best in Show, in which the dog show stage mom and dad’s constant, hateful manic bickering provides such an environment of anxiety and rancor for their pet Weimaraner that it ends up mauling one of the judges. Coming from this level of dysfunction and skewed moral compassery, it’s a small feat that DUI and grand theft auto are the only atrocities Lindsay has committed thus far. Sadly for everyone, it looks like there’ll be two more where she came from to pick up the slack.
Stacey Nosek is the world’s most articulate idiot, and a television columnist for Pajiba. You can also find her ripping on celebrities at Webster’s Is My Bitch.
Comments
Posted by: socalledonlycousins at May 29, 2008 12:18 PM
Blohan!