LOL

Overview: Imagine a Twilight movie where they cut out the middleman and just skip the whole sparkly vampire werewolf thing, leaving nothing but an endless, agonizing twinkathon of dead-eyed mouth-breathing dingbats making pouty faces into the camera and pretending to be teenagers/have salient thoughts about anything. Now put Miley Cyrus in the mix and see how long you can last before blacking out. If you make it the whole way through, you'll be fully qualified as an astronaut.

Directed By: Lisa Azuelos, 2012

The Case For: If human society ever becomes a Gattaca-esque dystopian eugenicist's wet dream, this movie could probably be used as an effective screening tool for skimming undesirable floaters out of the gene pool.

The Case Against: Actual tagline: "You can change your status, but not your heart."

There're lots of different ways to watch LOL - as a shitty rom com, a shitty coming-of-age story, a shitty social media circlejerk, a 90 minute slideshow of the world's most punchable faces, or even, as one colorful (and understandably pretty emotive) IMDB user put it, "a documentary of how not to make a movie" (our personal favorite). There certainly are some great what-not-to-do moments in here, like 'don't make all of your characters less appealing than a mutated anthrax enema,' 'don't cast Miley Cyrus in anything ever,' 'don't remake your own mediocre movies <5 years later with worse actors in every role,' etc.

Netflix refers to LOL as a "coming-of-age comedy for the social media era," Variety a "half-hearted theatrical dump," and weighing in at a robust 17% on the mostly-deserted Tomatometer, you can probably guess which description's more accurate. LOL-apologists would have us remember that this isn't meant to be a serious grownup movie for serious grownup people, but they're idiots so we can pretty safely ignore their stupid idiotic feelings and opinions, which are summarily wrong and dumb as hell. It's not like this is the first time we've lowered ourselves to scraping up the sickening, fuzzy leavings from the bottom of the Young Adult Entertainment sludge-barrel either way, but whatever genre you want to jam this thing into, we wouldn't be here if it was just kinda bad or pretty terrible.

We're here because sitting through this movie makes you want to say things like "watching your own limbs being amputated with no anesthesia would be way less painful than watching this movie," and "if you took a few hundred cans of alphabet soup and dumped them out into a kiddy pool, the resulting random globs of gibberish would make for a far better and more nourishing script than the one LOL barfs up and eats and then barfs up again over and over until you can't remember a time when you thought you knew what love or happiness were anymore."

R U Rdy 2 Rok?

It is a great movie for The Kids though, assuming you're trying to subliminally train The Kids to become soulless machiavellian social parasites whose sole occupations in life are self-worship, destroying other people for fun, and accumulating increasingly hollow/Bateman-esque sexual conquests before melting down publicly and dying empty and alone in a solid gold bathtub while Instagramming each other off-kilter taint shots on their phones. Not that there's anything wrong with that. After all, we all know that deep down, every parent secretly just wants to raise a family that doesn't quite make Eugene O'Neill characters look like the fucking Cleavers - as long as you can squeak in there on the family Horr-O-Meter somewhere between the Mansons and the Cunninghams, you're good.

Unless maybe you raise a chicken-fister. Nobody likes a chicken-fister:

By the way, no matter how irritating you think them naming the movie "LOL" is right now, wait until you find out that the flimsy pretense for it is that the main character's name is Lola and she claims that's a nickname her friends use for her. And no matter how irritating you think it is then, wait until you find out that nobody ever actually calls her that. Ever. Speaking of overpowering nausea, who wants a nonsensical out-of-the-blue high school overseas fieldtrip sequence that would probably leave most Parisians pining for the heady days of Nazi occupation?: