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#59 - Mean Girls
Mark Waters, 2004
A homeschooled teenager is enrolled in public school for the first time and is soon overwhelmed by the chaos of high-school life, especially when she becomes involved with the school's most popular students.
If you've been following my reviews then you might be wondering what the kind of person who would seriously trash Ghostbusters would make of a relatively recent high school comedy starring the lowest-hanging fruit on the celebrity-mocking tree and being predominantly focused on how teenage girls would relate to each other. It'd be a righteous piece of hatred, yeah? Well, if you've been expecting something like that then I have one little word for you...
...psych.
Because at the end of the day, I actually do like Mean Girls. Sure, it took a while to grow on me, but then again, so did The Big Lebowski. Lindsay Lohan makes a decent enough protagonist whose journey you are relatively invested in, but what really makes this film is the eccentric cast of characters that populate the school. Everyone from the titular girls through the bitter misfits and the beleagured teachers to the various bit parts that recur at just the right moments throughout the film is well-cast and more often than not get in at least one good line. The script, though it is ultimately hampered by a combination of sentimentality and the need to keep things down to a PG-13 rating, is actually pretty tight and very quotable. The direction is competent enough, as are the music choices, but that is almost besides the point in a movie like this. I know this isn't the best movie or anything, but it supports its fairly simple narrative with some well-written characters and dialogue and it's a testament to the quality of that work that I actually do feel like defending this supposedly saccharine piece of fluff.
Mark Waters, 2004
A homeschooled teenager is enrolled in public school for the first time and is soon overwhelmed by the chaos of high-school life, especially when she becomes involved with the school's most popular students.
If you've been following my reviews then you might be wondering what the kind of person who would seriously trash Ghostbusters would make of a relatively recent high school comedy starring the lowest-hanging fruit on the celebrity-mocking tree and being predominantly focused on how teenage girls would relate to each other. It'd be a righteous piece of hatred, yeah? Well, if you've been expecting something like that then I have one little word for you...
...psych.
Because at the end of the day, I actually do like Mean Girls. Sure, it took a while to grow on me, but then again, so did The Big Lebowski. Lindsay Lohan makes a decent enough protagonist whose journey you are relatively invested in, but what really makes this film is the eccentric cast of characters that populate the school. Everyone from the titular girls through the bitter misfits and the beleagured teachers to the various bit parts that recur at just the right moments throughout the film is well-cast and more often than not get in at least one good line. The script, though it is ultimately hampered by a combination of sentimentality and the need to keep things down to a PG-13 rating, is actually pretty tight and very quotable. The direction is competent enough, as are the music choices, but that is almost besides the point in a movie like this. I know this isn't the best movie or anything, but it supports its fairly simple narrative with some well-written characters and dialogue and it's a testament to the quality of that work that I actually do feel like defending this supposedly saccharine piece of fluff.