I usually like to keep track of what’s going on with Lindsay Lohan. Not so much because I’m interested in her projects, but because running a story on her gives me a guilt-free excuse to surf for Lindsay Lohan pics. Hey, I’ve only got a couple of years left in my hot-blooded twenties. Let me enjoy them.

But I’ve been lax as of late, and during my period of inattention she’s not only gained back enough weight to stave off the Skeletor effect, but she’s trying to turn herself into a legitimate actress. That’s as opposed to what she is now… window dressing. She showed flashes of ability in Mean Girls, but she’s squandered it by pandering to kids, and then spending her days in a boozed out, club skank haze. Well that’s about to change.

Lindsay’s upcoming slate of films isn’t filled with the sort of stuff you’ll see promoted on Radio Disney. Instead, she’s gone Indie in an attempt to get some credibility. Her next movie is Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, which she’ll follow up with work in Emilio Estevez’s passion project Bobby, a film set around the Robert Kennedy assassination.

What’s new is that according to Variety she’s now also hopped on board two other rather risky Indie movies. The first is an Any Warhol biopic called Factory Girl. Lindsay will play… wait for it… a fat girl. She’s been cast as the extremely heavyset Warhol posse participant Brigid Berlin, a self described “overweight troublemaker”. What’s really weird is that Lindsay beat out Mary Kate Olsen for the role. I’m not sure exactly what this movie’s producers are thinking… considering the two skinniest starlets in Hollywood to play a known hefty gal, but if it gets Lindsay to keep eating then I’m all for it. She looks better when she’s carrying around a little meat.

Lindsay’s other new project puts her back into the assassination game. She’s going to help Jared Leto kill John Lennon in the movie Chapter 27. Leto plays Lennon’s murderer (Some like to call him an assassin, but aren’t assassinations reserved for political figures?) Mark Chapman, while Lohan plays an obsessive fan who latches on to Chapman a couple of days before he does the deed.

All of this adds up to good news for movie fans. Lindsay Lohan, unlike some of her coked out counterparts, actually has some acting potential. The girl has talent, and if she can stop whoring herself around town long enough to take her acting seriously, she might one of these days amount to something. Even if she sucks, at least none of these Indie movie directors are likely to have her breasts digitally reduced a la Disney. That makes her recent move away from the kiddie crowd a winner.