Undiscovered

It's really bad news when a studio decides to cancel advance screenings for a movie, and it even worse when it also cancels press screenings, as it means that they don't want anybody at all to watch their movie before it comes out because the bad word will kill it.
All that happened with Undiscovered, though there was no way this could be any good when you have Ashlee Simpson on the poster. It was meant to be bad from the beginning, and it is bad. The question though is how bad, and how's Ashlee's acting, the only reason to go see this movie.

Ashlee's Clea is not the star of the movie, instead she plays best friend to the two leads, and she's in a lot of scenes throughout all the movie, but she doesn't have much to do other than to deliver cheesy lines like everybody else, or sing. Her acting is not good, but she wasn't the worst in the movie (more on that later) and the singing is not bad, actually enjoyable, as it is Steven Strait's singing. He plays the male lead. And the singing overall is the only actually high point of the movie.

Strait's acting is good, the only good acting part in the movie. The guy can act as he showed in Sky High (he was Warren Peace) and he'll surely become a star for young girls soon. He plays Luke Falcon here, a singer/songwriter to moves to California to change scenes and try his luck there. He's later accompanied by his brother Euan played by Kip Pardue.
But before they go, Luke meets the love of his life in a train station, they just look at each other for a while through the train's window, but he's in love. He still goes to the West Coast and doesn't see her again.
Well, he eventually does, as Brier played by Pell James, the girl in question, is a model who wants to try acting in California after learning that her rock star boyfriend is cheating on her while on a tour in Japan.
And so she goes to Los Angeles too, and they meet thanks to Clea, a young girl who is also trying acting and so she meets Brier in an acting academy, and she also sings with Luke every now and then at the local clubs.

And so Luke and Brier connect, it's love at first sight again, but Brier says she's still with her rock star boyfriend and doesn't want to be with another rockstar so nothing happens between them at that point. Instead, knowing how much Luke wants to make it in the business, she and Clea create fake publicity about Luke, making him look like a huge rising star so an agent that frequents the club would sign him. And from there lots of stupid things happen as Luke is signed and changes, Brier thinks she loves him but doesn't anything about it, and they all say and do stupid stuff courtesy of John Galt's script.

So Ashlee is bad, Strait is ok, and the rest are all horrible, starting with Pell James. She's a disaster from start to finish. And she's not even that hot to be a model.
Then Kip Pardue, who I loved in The Rules of Attraction (and I hear he's great in Loggerheads), he's embarrassing here. At one point he's doing karaoke wearing a thong and in the next scene he's about to get in bed with two girls. And his lines are so cheesy.
Also horrible is Shannyn Sossamon (who was in The Rules of Attraction too) as Josie, a Brazilian model hired to pose as Luke's girlfriend. At first she tries to fake the accent but after a few scenes she just talks normal and every now and then she switches back to trying the accent which is really bad.
Carrie Fisher is also here as Brier's modeling agent Carrie (that's her real name too! Very clever) and she looks so bad and old that she should just retire. Finally Fisher Stevens (from the Short Circuit movies) plays the music agent mentioned before and he's a disaster too.

The movie is not as bad as Hillary Duff's Raise your Voice though, just because the music here is actually good. But the acting is terrible save for Strait, and the idea of the story while good, is very hurt by the dreadful dialogue.
John Galt should just stop making movies (this one was his debut) and the same goes for director Meiert Avis, who loves to film his actors talking while moving the camera around them non-stop for minutes, making Undiscovered more unwatchable than it should. For some reason, I have a thing for this young stars, and despite the debacles in her singing career, I still have hope for Ashlee, and I'm willing to give her one more chance. Probably just one though.