“Living Lohan” Episode 9: And “Ali’s” Dreams Finally Come True

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.

Anyway, that was a tangent. Michael’s girlfriend wants to go on a date, and Cody Lohan wants the attention he clearly isn’t getting from his mom, so he’s running around with a water gun trying to play with them. Nina wants to sneak out, and asks Ali to help keep Cody occupied, and Ali simply can’t do that. Oh my gosh, she has a life.

Cody keeps lashing out at Nina, saying mean things to her because she’s a competition for attention. It’s really very sad in a very real way, because no one in the house has the slightest clue why he’s upset.

Dina is too busy getting Ali ready for her “Troll” audition to care much about her son. It’s as if, because she can’t sell him to someone, she doesn’t know what to do with him.

Ali asks Michael to run some script lines with her, and Nina plays H.O.R.S.E with Cody. Am I supposed to think they’re a normal family or something? Because, really, I’m just bored.

Ali is starting to freak out before the audition, saying she’s not feeling well and she’s sick and doesn’t want to go. Everyone keeps talking about all of Ali’s “natural talent.” The difference between Ali and Lindsay is, according to Nana Lohan, that Lindsay was “much more composed”, more professional, she just sort of went in and did her thing. Ali’s freak outs come across as prima donna more than anything else, so it’s difficult to be sympathetic for her.

Meeting with the director, Ali sits in the chair with her hair blown out and a ton of eye-makeup on, looking 35 or 40. Maybe not so much the look when you’re supposed to be playing a fresh, independent young magician. The director looks a bit like a ginger Peter Jackson, and he’s wearing a black t-shirt with “Troll” emblazoned across it. I can tell just by looking at him that this is an A-plus director, and that this is going to be an Oscar contending movie.

Ali’s audition goes predictably terrible. A lot of it is nerves: she’s stammering, rushing, not looking up as she reads. Some of it is just lack of talent. She’s trying to sound like she thinks actors sound, and there’s a tinny, artificial pitch to her voice which is a bit terrible.

Nana and Dina are talking in the waiting room. Nana wonders how things are going for Ali, and Dina, who knows everything about making movies, responds “Mom, if you’re a REALLY GOOD director, you can see if someone has talent whether they know the lines, they don’t know the lines…” I’m thinking that’s pretty much the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. What’s the point then of even knowing the script? Actors should show up for aura test-screenings and just stand there and the directors can just sense who should be in the role and who shouldn’t be.

Once Ali calms down a bit, she has some very good moments. She isn’t a very likable actress—she’s too precociously sexual to have, say, her own show on Disney—but she plays tough very well. She’d be a great tween character actress to play gritter roles that could make good use of her oddly smoky voice. But one gets the sense that her heart isn’t in this. She’s doing it because she’s fun, she’s doing it because she wants to be famous, but one senses she doesn’t really love it, there’s no a passion for it. But regardless of what I think, the director gives her the role because she’s “made for this.” More like “the free publicity E! is giving us is made for this!” Ali calls Lindsay to tell her she got it, and Lindsay literally says hello and then hangs up 5 seconds later. Apparently she’s “on set” and “filming.” And by “set’, we mean Samantha Ronson, and by “filming” we mean “scissoring.”

They get back to the house and the final mix of Ali’s song is finally remixed and retooled so she finally sounds great. Hurray computers! The song, by the way, isn’t terrible. But it isn’t good either. Kind of like Ali.

Episode 6:Fear and Loathing in “Living Lohan”

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.

Dina is always talking, refusing to shut her mouth in order to keep the focus on her, rather than the daughter she ostensibly represents. This includes talking over her children. While Ali is in the recording studio, Dina takes Cody into Vegas. Dina promises it’s all about what Cody wants, and he sees the New York rollercoaster and excitedly says he’d like to do that. But Dina makes an executive decision that they will instead go have lunch with a magician.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, the scene is cringe-worthy. Poor Ali is dreadful, and facing a room full of eight or so guys in their early-thirties. The producer and her vocal coach are trying to tell Ali that her problem is lack of confidence, but it isn’t. Despite the fact that the producer is sucking up like a hoover, everyone else looks bored or embarrassed. Ali isn’t suffering from lack of confidence so much as she is aware she is average, she knows everyone else knows it.

After lunch with the magician, there is a genuine moment of mothering where Dina takes Cody to Madame Tussaud’s. But when they get home and Ali hears about the fun day they had without her, she starts crying. Dude, singing is so hard, and she hasn’t been out all day. Part of the breakdown is inevitable, as Ali is a brat, but a good part of it is that she’s a kid, and she doesn’t want to be working, she wants to be having fun. After a good brow-beating from her mother, Ali decides this is totally what she wants to do. Uh-huh. To drive the point home, Dina takes Ali to The Pearl concert hall, where she makes Ali sing her new song on stage. If you watching at home noticed how Ali’s voice improved, it wasn’t because of Ali’s “newfound confidence,” but rather the result of E! producers having her sing along to the pre-recorded, ProTools-enhanced track. And thank heavens for ProTools and vocoder technology, or how would Ali ever live her dream?

And of course, the episode ends on a high note, with Ali triumphing with her new, confident voice, blushing as her final cut is played for everyone in the studio. It’s a sad state on the formulaic nature of pop music when a girl with a weak, average, and overly-breathy voice can turn out a passable dance track in a day and a half.

The most painful-yet psychologically interesting-part of this episode is watching the awkward “conversations” between Dina and whomever she can find, where she justifies her mothering and her lifestyle. These “moments” are so transparently setup after the episode has been stitched together in order to make Dina more likable, that they have the opposite effect: instead, they make her look cloying and desperate. But you know, so is this whole show.

Check Out This Clip From Living Lohan

…or as I like to call it: “How to Raise a Train Wreck.”