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- Watch your back.
Summary Capsule
- A girl who has been home-schooled in Africa becomes a junior in a typical American high school and quickly becomes both prey and predator in power struggles, secret machinations, and butterfly-inducing crushes
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Kyle's Rating: How come the mean girls are always the most alluring?
Kyle's Review: I guess I’ve always had a weird relationship with my high school
years. Despite growing up with films like Heathers and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and all the other John Hughes and anti-Hughes cinematic highlights, I didn’t assign 9th through 12th grade with any more importance than I did with the first 7 grades (I skipped first grade). I think a lot of that is due to my inherent aloof nature (it’s my favorite Kyle trait!), but also due to the fact that my high school, nestled away in a Denver suburb, was nothing like the emotional war zones that others pass through elsewhere.
So that weirdness I mentioned earlier comes from hanging out with friends nowadays and having nothing to match up their high school tales of misery, physical pain, and degradation. Keep in mind that a lot of my current crowd either went to California inner-city high schools (which not always but often are scary even to drive by) or to west coastal schools up in Oregon or Washington that rival Los Angeles schools for weapons possession and daily beatings.
It’s pretty whack, listening to all that with my only comparable story being when I almost got suspended when our AP English teacher told us that she thought of all of us as her children and I replied that if we were all her children (there were about 18 of us) she’d probably walk bowlegged. Is that so wrong? My team won the AP Bowl and the prize was dinner at our teacher’s house, and it was there she just threw out “Oh, yeah, I almost had you suspended but then between my husband [my geography instructor] and the principal [who loved me] we all decided to just let it slide. More lasagna?” This was like a minute after she thanked me for being the lone student on the hiring committee who had hired her the previous summer, so it was pretty crazy.
Since I’m into the fifth paragraph, maybe I should start talking about Mean Girls, yeah? But besides bragging, I wanted to show that I had a pretty well-established sense of identity in high school: I was the Venkman-like kid who approached girls and homework and attendance and everything as stuff I could con pretty much anyway I wanted. That sounds really sleazy, but it’s funny, so I’ll leave it in. My friend Kelly once told me I was the only person she knew who could do anything I wanted and get away with it. It’s the Ferris Bueller in me! What can I say: that was one of the greatest compliments anyone ever gave me. I love you, Kelly.
I also love Lindsay Lohan, but in a different way. Lohan portrays Cady Heron (pronounced “Katie Heron”), a rather unique girl who is entering Evanston Township High School as a junior after being home-schooled all her life, which was mostly spent in Africa. Her parents are anthropologists and raised her in the wild, but now her dad’s job has brought them to America and it’s time for Cady to get indoctrinated into American society through high school.
As you might guess, it’s pretty rough for Cady on that first day, since she’s used to wild animals but not as wild as American teenagers (go U.S.A.!). Thankfully, Cady is portrayed by Lohan, who is smokin’ hot, and right after she makes two friends from the outcast crowd Cady gets an ultra-rare invite to lunch with the Plastics, who are the 2004 model of the Heathers, with much more money and an appeal to a wider demographic that includes young children (no suicides or games of strip croquet in Mean Girls, sorry to say). Cady isn’t sure that she wants to go Plastic but her outcast-y friends Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese) decide they can destroy the Plastics from within if Cady will serve as a double-agent, so Cady agrees to go Plastic for nefarious purposes.
But being a Plastic means power and prestige, and that may lure Cady over to the dark side and away from the wholesome home-schooled girl she was before. Meanwhile, adult males who get dragged to Mean Girls but are strong enough to resist the charms of cinematic nubile teenagers get a double entertainment whammy from Tina Fey’s charmingly fun yet wittily caustic script and Fey’s early somewhat-gratuitous but wholly appreciated bra shot. Yeah, that’s how you sell your writing/acting skills to the audience, Tina Fey!
As Roger Ebert noted (go Roger!), Mean Girls is exceptional in the way it hits all the plot points you’d expect (Cady throws a little get-together at her house that blows up out-of-hand, Cady falls for a forbidden guy, the teachers and principal have to get involved in turmoil that occurs and one teacher in particular [go Tina Fey!] has thoughtful and honest words for the girls, Cady wears a tight shirt or ten) but doesn’t necessarily go overboard on selling those formula points as the film’s strengths. Mean Girls progresses along as you might expect, but with a couple curveballs and a resistance to the black-and-white judgments that almost always color high school movies. Friends get betrayed, but they weren’t perfect friends to begin with. Lessons are learned and karmic comeuppance is dished out, but it’s all organically evolved from the plot and much closer to real world occurrences than the usual cinematic staging where a bad guy gets a pie-in-the-face / fill-in-the-blank humiliation while everyone laughs and uplifting music plays.
Maybe nowadays everyone, even kids in high school, know that high school isn’t and shouldn’t be the highlight of your life (unless you’re a really attractive high school quarterback or cheerleader!) so high school movies don’t have to present themselves as treatises on life. It’s just four years that usually occur during the transition from childhood to adulthood, where a lot of stuff is changing and everyone is trying to find their identity in an atmosphere that seems to equate signs of vulnerability with skin diseases: if you’ve got ‘em, you keep your mouth shut about it.
I highly recommend Mean Girls. I’m a fan of Lohan (as an actress; get your mind out of the gutter, please) so I felt guilty about skipping Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, though I was just too busy with school and odd dates to hit the theaters. But Mean Girls came out at a time when all my big projects were pretty much done so I could go check it out, and I’m very glad I did. Mean Girls is pretty versatile: It can either serve as slight but rewarding entertainment or you can really think about all the character relationships and motivations and bask in the glory of a thoughtful script that got treated respectfully on the way to becoming a thoughtful movie. And it’s always great to see Tim Meadows being funny.
Go if you want to see what I think is as close to an updated version of the great 80's high school films as we’re going to get; go if you want some sophisticated laughs within a familiar yet pleasantly-skewed story; go if you want to check out Hollywood’s idea of hot high school girls. No matter what sort of high school experience you had (or are having), Mean Girls is just plain fun. And if I picked on you in high school, I’m sorry. Wanna buy a pizza?
Clare's Rating: This movie could have easily been called "Bitches", but I'm willing to bet the
marketing department at Paramount wasn't down with that idea.
Clare's Review: I rented Mean Girls one afternoon recently with my sister when we decided we
were more than overdue for a girly movie extravaganza. There are certain movies we both, as card-carrying, non-girly girls, are loath to admit we actually want to see. Thusly, about twice a year, we scurry to the video store in clever
disguises and hang our heads in shame while the hipster indie video store clerk, who usually can't stand the sight of us anyway, works double time not to actually spit on us for having such bad taste. You should have seen him the time
we stumbled in after getting our courage up with a couple of margaritas to try and rent Dirty Dancing...
But we rented Mean Girls because we'd actually both heard from a couple of different places (including Kyle's surprisingly glowing review here) that, for a teen movie about popular high school girls, it wasn't altogether that horrible. And when I found out that Tina Fey (who I love on Saturday Night Live) wrote the screenplay based on a book about the horror of being a teenaged girl that's actually written for parents, we threw caution to the wind and picked it up.
I remember being a teenager. And I can't imagine it's gotten anything other than MORE horrifying since my time in high school. I think if I were still a teenaged girl I would have really loved this movie. Because it speaks to some really heinous crap that we (the women folk that is) put each other through year after arduous high school year. I certainly won't pretend I was somehow more evolved than my classmates at the time I was experiencing all the insecurities and horrendous self doubt that goes along with puberty and dating and grades and whatever other drama one might have thrown at them in those years. I wasn't popular by any stretch. But I still hated other girls. And still talked sh** about them with my friends. Even though I hated that they were doing the EXACT SAME THING to me. It's a vicious cycle I tell you. And one that appears to be inevitable. So it was certainly refreshing to see the entire phenomenon broken down and examined like an anthropological study in human cruelty.
There are a few moments in the movie where the story veers from smart and clever into contrived and dumb. And there are a few parts that I thought were pretty shabbily thrown together. By for the most part, I really enjoyed it. Enough to even admit that I rented it and to tell anyone who I think might listen to me that it's actually worth seeing. It's not as great as Heathers or as realistic as Say Anything, but it's still solid entertainment about what it's like to be an American teenager in our wacky and wonderful public school system. Worth a gander.
 Revenge Of The Size 4's
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- When Cady's parents drive off to Madison, they exit her street to the left of the screen. She waves at them in that direction for a while. But that night, when she has the party, she follows Janice in the car to the left of the screen and around a cul-de-sac. Which means her parents could not have driven off indefinitely to the left.
- Cady’s parents are both funny people! Dad is Scrubs’ Neil Flynn (the janitor); Mom is Saturday Night Live alumni Ana Gasteyer.
- In one lunchroom shot, the ambiguously gay guy is using slices of meat to pretend to be Sloth from The Goonies.
Is It Worth Staying Through End Credits?
Kyle did not. Kyle likes goofy teenage-y pop music generally, but Kyle was
hungry and wanted multiple Cuca’s burritos once the credits started to roll.
Having done a tiny amount of research, Kyle can pretty much say, however, that
it is not worth staying, since it doesn’t sound like anything exciting
happens. It’s totally your call, though.
Intermission! [some sources: IMDb]
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The trailer includes a scene that is not included in the theatrical release in
which a table in the school cafeteria is booby trapped so it collapses,
resulting in a plate of food flying all over one of the characters.
Apparently Mean Girls nearly earned an R rating for explicit, risqué gags and jokes which were subsequently cut. Whatever. That ratings system is pretty crazy.
In the book upon which the movie is based, the most popular girl in a school is given the title "Queen Bee". In the movie, the character who fits that description is named Regina - "queen" in Latin.
The goth girl Janis Ian was named after the singer of the same name, who wrote the song "At Seventeen" which can be heard playing in the background when the girls were fighting at Regina's house.
Groovy Quotes
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Regina: So you've never been to a real school before? Shut up! Shut up!
Cady: I didn't say anything.
[after meeting Cady]
Regina: You're really pretty!
Cady: Thanks.
Regina: So you agree?
Cady: What?
Regina: You think you're pretty?
Cady: Uh... I don't know.
Karen: If you're from Africa, why are you white?
Gretchen: Oh my God, Karen, you can't ask people why they're white.
Coach Carr: Don't have sex! Because you will get Chlamydia... and die!
Janis: That's Karen Smith, one of the dumbest girls you'll ever meet!
Cady: Well, there must be something you're good at.
Karen: Well, there is this one thing, it's like I have a fifth sense. It's like
I have ESPN or something? My breasts can always tell when it's raining.
Gretchen: I'm sorry that people are so jealous of me, but I can't help it that I'm so popular!
Regina: Who does she think she is? I like *invented* her!
Regina: I love your skirt! Where'd you get it?
Girl: It's my mom's old skirt from the 80's.
Regina: Oh, vintage, so adorable.
Girl: Thanks.
Regina: [after girl walks away] That is the ugliest effing skirt I have ever seen.
Regina: I know she's kind socially retarded and weird, but she's my friend.
Karen: It won't close!
Regina: (trying on a dress) It's a five!
Karen: Excuse me. Do you have this in a larger size?
Saleslady: We only carry sizes 1, 3, and, 5. You could try Sears.
Gretchen: That is so fetch!
Regina: Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen! It's not going to happen!
Mr. Duvall: There is a serious problem here and we're going to solve it right now. I'll keep you here all night if I have to.
Secretary: We can only keep them until four.
Mr. Duvall: I will keep you here until four.
Mr. Duvall: I should cancel your Spring Fling but we've already hired the DJ.
Cady: Half of the people in this room don't like me, and the other half only like me because they think I pushed someone into a bus.
Jessica Lopez: I don't hate you cuz yo' fat... yo' fat cuz I hate you!
Girl: One time, Regina George punched me in the face. It was AWESOME.
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This review page was last updated on 11.30.04
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