Hey, this is no laughing matter

LOL

DIRECTOR: Lisa Azuelos

CAST: Demi Moore, Miley Cyrus, Ashley Greene

CLASSIFICATION: 13 LSD

RUNNING TIME: 95 minutes

RATING: **

IT MAY BE about high school students, but this film is very much from the point of view of an adult trying to understand how American teenagers navigate the worlds of Twitter, Facebook, IM and LOL.

Theoretically this is based on an award-winning French film, but everything that made that film so clever on its home turf is sanitised, so this coming-of-age story has more in common with Disney’s movie Cheetah Girls than with the other award-winning French film, The Class.

While Demi Moore may be old enough to be Miley Cyrus’s mother, the younger woman is too old to be playing a teenage schoolgirl.

Still, the demographic that loves Hannah Montana may lap this up as it follows a year in the school life of Lola (Cyrus), also sometimes known as Lol to her friends. So this could work for the younger teenagers who catch the reruns.

Anyway, back to the film. Lola discovers her boyfriend has been unfaithful during their school holidays, but finds solace in the arms of her best friend.

He’s trying to start an emo band, but his dad is having none of it, and this difficult relationship impacts on the teens, so there’s major scope for miscommunication from the get-go.

For the adults there’s Moore struggling to get over her ex-husband, raise her three kids and keep some sort of communication line open with her eldest daughter.

The dialogue and script are clichéd and humdrum and the film begins to feel dated because of the very specific slang and communi-cation methods used.

There’s more of an emphasis on the technology that is used to communicate than there is on the communication, which isn’t earth-shattering anyway.

In a world where communication should be the easiest thing – after all every one of these well-off, fairly well-behaved middle-class kids has a computer, a phone and a mouth – the teens still struggle to articulate their feelings to each other and their parents. On this level the film is totally believable and pretty much anyone can identify with that angle.

There’s a hilarious sequence involving a raw chicken, which is more funny for the mom’s reaction than anything else, but for the most part this film isn’t so much “laugh out loud” as occasional snigger.

Everything that might have been edgy or difficult about Lola’s life – experimenting with sex, drugs or boundaries – is smoothed out and presented as easily handled with a cuddle from mom. This film is nowhere near as provocative as Cyrus’s real-life take on social media networking is.

It’s vanilla Android, when what we really want is Apple with attitude.

If you liked… The Gilmore Girls… you will like this.