Reality Roll Call

According to sources, manager Johnny Wright would love to manage the marginally talented Ali Lohan’s career, if her mother would loosen up on the reins to allow it.

Wright, who has managed the careers of New Kids on the Block, Britney Spears, and the Backstreet Boys, as well as Timberlake, would like to strike while the iron is lukewarm when it comes to the career of the Living Lohan co-star. The key to success would be to milk the cash cow before it’s totally ruined by the overbearing hand of her mother, Dina.

The 14 year-old Lohan is currently working on her second album, “Interpersonal.”

As if Living Lohan wasn’t an insufferable spectacle of familial dysfunction  and stage-motherly self-promotion, it has the potential to get much worse.

The producers of the Ali and Dina reality embarrassment have approached daddy Michael to appear to next season’s show. That it, if the show comes back for a second season. According to an insider, his appearance would not be so much about him being Ali’s dad as it would be about being Dina’s ex:

“The producers for Living Lohan have been talking to Michael about being on the show. They want to capture all the drama that goes on between Dina and her ex-husband.”

The plan would be to have Dina and Michael go to weekly counseling sessions for the cameras. Wait, what exactly is Living Lohan supposed to be about again?

Last week on “Living Lohan” Ali leaves Vegas. After returning to Long Island, she has an offer to audition for a movie. Now we can see Dina really shine: not as a pushy music momager, but as a pushy stage mom! Hurray!

The episode starts off with a little “Just a normal family” slice-of-life shtick. We see Michael home, visiting with his girlfriend Nina. They’re hanging out in the room they share upstairs, and she’s walking around half-naked after getting out of the shower. Now, I don’t expect everyone to be as old-fashioned as me, but I will say that even the most liberal of my friends’ parents still enforce a separate-room policy for non-engaged couples. And when the kids are barely out of their teens, as is the case with Michael Lohan and company, it’s even more strange. And I suppose it wouldn’t be a big deal if Dina Lohan was a responsible mother in other ways, but to me, this whole thing smack of the kind of “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom” attitude Dina seems to adore.

I can’t believe we’re only on episode 8 of this series. I could have sworn I’ve sat through over 20 episodes of brattiness and self-indulgence. Why doesn’t Dina Lohan just kill her children on camera and get it over with? It’d be faster than the death march she’s doing now. It’s like every episode is one more step on the Lohan family Trail of Tears.

The episode opens with Dina on the phone trying to find a new producer because, OH MY GOSH GUYS SHE WAS TOTALLY RIGHT that Jeremy’s song was just too much of a “guy’s song” for Ali. Instead of Jeremy, Ali decides she wants to do another track with a sketchy, child-molester type named “Eman” (Emanuel Kiriakou). Ali prefers him because he makes her feel “comfortable with herself, and with singing”, something Jeremy didn’t do. Right, because Jeremy didn’t kowtow to her pouting and mooning, something Kiddie “E-man” Porn clearly has no problem doing. E-man. WTF—is this 1994?

If you want to see a template for how to turn a cute, innocent boy into a future date-rapist, look no further than this week’s episode. About halfway through Ali’s recording session, Dina takes Cody for some “fun”—meeting Hugh Hefner and his three girlfriends, who just happen to be at the Palms for someone’s birthday. Because that’s totally the right roll model for a twelve year old boy—a decrepit corpse man who’s “feminist” contributions include the statement  that sophisticated, complex women are somehow “mentally filthy.” As I watch Hugh’s brain-dead blondes giggle like the drunk 18-year-olds on the Girls Gone Wild commercials, the still-sweet Cody noticeably backs away whenever possible (he says diplomatically “Hugh’s girlfriend is very nice, but I’m a one girlfriend kind of guy”). Dina is oblivious to the horror she inflicts, saying “I’ve never seen Cody so shy and quiet in my entire life.”

This week’s episode of “Living Lohan” starts pretty typically: Ali falls and hurts her ankle, and Dina is annoyed they might miss their plane. Man, this woman is so full of maternal sympathy I tear up sometimes as I remember my own childhood.

Dina, Ali, and Cody fly in to Vegas (staying at the Plams, natch), where they almost immediately go to a party with a whole slew of music executives. Everything from Dina’s poor-man’s Farrah Fawcett hair to her minidress screams of a sort of predatory sexual competition with her daughters that seems terribly disturbing.

Ali is recording at the Palms recording studio (who knew they even had one?) in her white booty shorts and whore eyemakeup. I wanted her to have a good voice, I really did, because I don’t want to have to rip on a young girls looks AND her “talent.” But despite her good intentions, Ali is terrible. Flat and awkward and trying way too hard to be sexy at an age where I doubt she even knows what sexy is.

Vegas has a very 2003 feel to it—you know, back when George Clooney and Brad Pitt were investing in casinos and everyone and their PA was hosting some vodka party at the Palms. So when Dina uproots her family to Vegas to record Ali’s album, it feels pretty apropos. Rapidly declining family dynasty who think they’re still somebody move to a rapidly declining city filled with rapidly declining people who still think they’re somebodies. Yeah, that seems about right.

My gosh, how much longer will this show go on?

“Living Lohan” has spent a good deal of its 4 episode run padding its half-hour with the barest threads of drama and plot. But when the most interesting and thought provoking aspect of the show is seeing Dina Lohan in the morning without makeup, it’s clear there is a limit to how much the fabric of a story can be stretched. This week, a battle over dog and a mild disagreement with a girlfriend is meant to provide us with half an hour’s entertainment. And yes, it’s as boring as you’d imagine.

Episode 4 opens with a photo shoot for dog magazine starring all 5 of the Lohan dogs. In between shots of animals getting into trash cans and stealing bread from the toaster, we have to endure more of Dina’s constant stream of whining about the invasive media: “When I was in the business, it was not like this. Your privacy was your privacy.” The amount of hypocrisy inherent in a reality TV star complaining about pervasive media is so well documented there’s little point in even calling attention to it.

by Mary Jones

This week, Living Lohan finally brings us an episode that has the potential to make some sort of social statement, to actually document something more substantial than where Lindsay Lohan’s mother gets her nails done. Fourteen is a hellish age—everyone knows this. But girls know it more than anyone. Having attended an all-girl school in Dallas when I was Ali Lohan’s age, I can report first hand that any female who survives 7^th and 8^th grade without major life-long neuroses is a true champion. While boys beat up on each other and terrorize physically, fourteen year old girls are running their own little Abu Ghraibs with various forms of psychological torture that would make the CIA balk.

by Mary Jones

There’s a scene in Lindsay Lohan’s “Mean Girls” where Cady is talking to Regina’s mother (Amy Poehler), who proclaims “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom as her dog gnaws on her hard breast implants and her five-year-old daughter pulls up her shirt to a “Girls Gone Wild” commercial. So when I see Lindsay’s real-life mom Dina “White Oprah” Lohan in tabloids going from club to club, partying with her daughter, acting as a bratty momager, wearing as much makeup (and practically the same clothes) as her 14-year-old daughter Ali, it’s a bit uncomfortable. Especially since the purpose of her new reality series “Living Lohan” is to show how fabulous Dina is, how busy and admired and hated on. She isn’t a regular mom, she’s a cool mom! And if you’re going to drink, she’s rather you’d do it in the house.