Review by Donner

Paramount Pictures Presents
Mean Girls

Watch your back

Reviewed 10.18.04

Directed by Mark S. Waters

Screenplay by Tina Fey

Based on the book by Rosalind Wiseman

Starring Lindsay Lohan, Tina Fey, Jonathan Bennett, Lizzy Caplan, and Ana Gasteyer

FUN FACT: Tim Meadows broke his hand before shooting and had to wear a cast, so the explanation that his character Mr. Duvall had carpal tunnel was added.

Mean Girls is the ultimate proof that any genre can be good.

Now, I normally hate movies that focus on vacant-headed high school girls.  Come to think of it, I hate a large portion of high school girls in general.  Those self-centered, immature, gum-smacking, empty-headed girls who think that everything on Earth must revolve around them and the nonsensical nothingness that is their lives.  I hate them... and if you're looking at the screen right now, scratching your head, and wondering what kind of person I'm talking about... if you're in high school... it's you.

So it's a given that I pretty much hate movies like Clueless, for example that focus on these wastes of space.

What are the odds then that a movie that not only focuses on these hollow-headed little bimbettes but also turns everything I hate about them into major plot points would turn out to be one of the funniest and most intelligently-written high school movies in the last ten years?

Obviously, those odds are pretty good since Mean Girls is one of the greatest movies about high school shallowness I've ever seen.

Mean Girls stars Lindsey Lohan who, thank goodness, I can finally think dirty thoughts about and not feel like a pedophile.  Lohan plays a lifetime home schooled kid who spent her childhood in Africa so naturally, her first day of public school is more of a culture shock than it is a social wake up call.  After a couple of days of not fitting in, she makes a couple of socially outcast friends but soon, she finds herself being drawn into the tight grips of a social clique called The Plastics, the perfect group of high school girls led by the purely evil girl on top, Regina George.

Lindsey and her secret social outcast friends see this as a perfectly good opportunity not only to spy on the Plastics and learn their secrets, but to also destroy them from the inside out.

For a genre that I hate, I really dug this movie.  For one, it's more of a smartly written satire than it is a self-indulgent celebration of shallowness.  In Mean Girls, there are consequences and well developed characters to go along with the low-brow pettiness that young girls are known for.  Mean Girls is a bright beacon of intelligence in a wasteland of stupidity.

I'm just in shock as to how good a movie is.  All the touchy topics of self-loathing, body image, and girl-on-girl all-out hate is handled in this movie which takes it all, presents it to the audience, and makes us all laugh at just how retarded it all is in the first place.