Movie Reviews
What I have to say is that Tina Fey (Saturday Night Live) got it right. This film looks directly into heart of teenage cliques, how they are formed, and who is apart of them. I can say, without exaggeration, that teenagers can be the cruelest people in the world when they want to be, and that is the whole point of this film.
Lindsay Lohan plays Cady (pronounced Katie), a girl from Africa who’s been home schooled by her parents and never stepped foot inside a public school. Now it’s her junior year in high school, and she is thrown into quite a different world of education. She doesn’t know the latest trends or slurs that are said. She doesn’t even seem to know what popularity is. And this is what makes the film so funny.
Teens don’t like to admit it, but cliques are truly the sum of all evil. They work as a body, destroying everything that other cliques hold dear. In “Mean Girls” we see the front line of the war of the cliques. Cady encounters just such a group who call themselves the “Plastics”: a three girl set who are thought to be the dumbest and the hottest girls in the school. (They wear pink every Wednesday). But when Cady is befriended by a guy and a girl (the guy is definitely gay, the girl might be) who despise the Plastics, they assign her to become a Plastic, follow them everywhere, and then tell all the stupid things that they did. She basically wants to ruin the reputation of their leader, Regina George.
What I enjoyed about this film is that, although everything is exaggerated, it almost never goes over the top. The unspeakable female jargon of jr. high and high school that is used is so accurately that I sometimes believed what was happening. But you can never do that very long. Towards the end, the film does get a little out of hand, but laughs come with it.
I thoroughly liked the role of Tim Meadows and most of the cast, and their cockamamie personalities. Fey wrote the screenplay based on a book (no joke) entitled Queen Bees and Wannabees: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence, that discusses the happenings of teen life and the effects it has on females. “Mean Girls” is a sadistically funny social comedy filled with smart dialogue and even smarter pranks. Flawed, but still an achievement, Tina Fey and the rest of the cast should be proud of what has come of this. ***