Mean Girls (2004)

Mean Girls confirmed one thing for me; I am so glad I never had a daughter. According to this movie, teenage girls are all petty, self-centered, vicious creatures who spend far too much time judging and insulting each other.

A new girl, Cady, who has been home schooled all her life, attends high school for the first time. She makes friends with a couple of social misfits but then finds herself being friends with the school snobs known as The Plastics. The Plastics are the beautiful, rich stuck-up stereotypes seen in every teen movie. Cady's two outcast friends come up with a plan to sabotage The Plastics, so Cady pretends to like The Plastics in order to get close enough to them to take them down. However, being popular is an intoxicating drug and soon Cady's loyalties are in question.

A woman writes this movie from a book that was written by a woman. I assume then that these ladies understand the female mind. If so, then this does not speak well for young women. Every girl in this movie is cruel at some point. Even Cady, who is supposed to be the nice girl in this movie, turns into being just as nasty as every other girl.

Mean Girls has some good biting lines. When Cady first meets The Plastics, she tells them that she used to live in Africa. "If you're from Africa, why are you white?" One Plastic asks, which shocks another Plastic. "Oh my God, Karen, you can't just ask people why they're white."

At one point, Cady is talking about head Plastic Regina, "I have this theory, that if you cut off all her hair she'd look like a British man." Regina has her own opinion of Cady as well: "I know she's kind of socially retarded and weird, but she's my friend... so, just promise me you won't make fun of her!" She tells some people.

Young women may find humor in this movie, but I was just pretty much appalled. A bunch of young women being bitchy is hardly entertaining. Supposedly, by the end of the movie, some lessons have been learned, but these characters are so unlikable that I didn't care if they learned anything or not.

I disagree with Eric that you need to be a young girl to enjoy this movie. It might help in relating to the characters, but even not being a teenage girl, I still found this movie to be very funny, despite most of the characters being dislikably shallow.

As Eric said, these characters aren't original. They're harsher versions of the girls from Clueless and a dozen other teen movies from the 1980s.

In fact, every ten years or so a teen movie comes around with this -- or a very similar -- plot that turns out to be a hit. Where this one stands out is in the writing. Tina Fey uses her experience as a Saturday Night Live writer/cast member to good use, injecting the script with a bit of added zaniness. She also brings along several former and current SNL cast members, including Tim Meadows who gets some genuine laughs as the school Principal; one of the few male parts in the movie. His scene in the gym where he's going to get to the bottom of all that's going on at the school is one of the funniest in the movie.

While it's true that these girls are quite bitchy at times, it's also true that they get some truly funny dialogue. Who cares, if you'd hate them in real life, in a movie they're funny as hell.

I laughed my ass off at the catty humor in this movie. This is, after all, just a silly high school comedy and not a serious statement on the female sex. Like all good comedy it exaggerates things for a laugh.

The Plastics get most of the funny lines. Like when Gretchen is constantly using the term fetch, as in "That is so fetch!" and Regina shoots her down with, "Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen! It's not going to happen!" Or when Regina spouts pearls of wisdom to new girl Cady such as, "Irregardless, ex-boyfriends are just off limits to friends. I mean that's just like the rules of feminism."

Cady in voice-over gets a few good ones as well, my favorite is, "Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it."

And just so the adults aren't left completely out, the oversexed Coach Carr delivers this zinger, "Don't have sex, because you will get pregnant and die! Don't have sex in the missionary position, don't have sex standing up, just don't do it, OK, promise? OK, now everybody take some rubbers."

A silly movie with an inspired cast. Lindsay Lohan continues to impress as an actress. Like she did in Freaky Friday she plays a character that goes through noticeable personality changes without being completely obvious about it. And she looks so much like a young Ann-Margret.

Mean Girls is a funny movie that wants only to entertain. What's wrong with that?