Mean Girls (Blu-ray)

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Note: In the following joint Blu-ray review both John and Eddie provide their opinion of the film, with John also writing up the Video, Audio, Extras, and Parting Shots.

The Film According to John:
Before Lindsay Lohan became as famous for her offscreen activities as for her movie performances ("The Parent Trap," "Freaky Friday") and before Tina Fey ran for the Vice Presidency of the United States ("Saturday Night Live"), the pair made "Mean Girls" in 2004. Lohan starred, and Fey wrote the screenplay and co-starred. The movie takes some mildly amusing shots at formula, new-girl-in-town teen films and, while breaking no new ground, at least leaves one smiling. Given its potential, I just wish it had done something more.

Lohan plays Cady Heron, a sixteen-year-old whose parents have home-schooled her while traveling around the world as research zoologists. The family has just returned from an extended stay in Africa and finally settled down in middle America, so Cady is off to a regular public school for the first time in her life. She goes from the wild to the wilder.

The filmmakers, basing their movie on the book "Queen Bees and Wannabes" by Rosalind Wiseman, intend for Cady's encounters at North Shore High School to represent and satirize most of the problems of everyday, middle-class high-school life. We get shots at name-calling, backbiting, gossiping, rumormongering, petty jealousies, and general cattiness, just for starts. If it seems as though you've seen all this before, well, yeah, you probably have. The movie's successes, minor as they may be, are in the details.

On Cady's first day of school, she learns that animals of the veldt who eat each other for dinner are nicer to one another than the student body at North Shore. Practically everybody at school is a creep or a jerk. Naturally, various cliques entirely make up the student body, each clique sitting at a different table in the cafeteria. There are the jocks, the cheerleaders, the hotties, the blacks, the cool Asians, the thin girls, the fat girls, the art freaks, the band geeks, the burnouts, the wannabes, the nerds, the preps, the freshmen, the ROTC, etc. At the top of the ladder are the Plastics, the royalty of the cliques, whose leader, Regina George (Rachel McAdams), is the Queen Bee, the richest, meanest girl in school.

Despite the fact that Cady is brilliant and beautiful, almost nobody wants to have anything to do with her because she doesn't belong to a clique, so the first friends she makes are a pair of outsiders like herself: Damian (Daniel Franzese), a gay, witty young man, and Janis (Lizzy Caplan), a smart, semi-goth, artsy type girl. (Nobody in the film actually looks, talks, or thinks like a teenager, neither figuratively nor literally. Lohan is about the only person in the movie who was still in her teens when she made it, and the others appear to be just what they are, twenty-somethings.)

Now comes the major plot contrivance. Janis holds a grudge against Regina for spreading a rumor about her being a lesbian. When Regina and her followers take an unexpected interest in Cady, Janis and Damian urge Cady to go along with it, become a Plastic, and then sabotage them.

The problem is that the more Cady comes to dislike Regina and all she stands for, the more she also wants to fit in and be thought of as glamorous like Regina and her friends. Therefore, the more Cady resists the idea, the more she really wants to be a Plastic. That's the real conflict, the real teeth, of the show. We sometimes find ourselves wanting what we most despise. Life is unfair, but so what?

Tina Fey's co-starring role is almost incidental, playing a divorced math teacher, Ms. Norbury. The movie's funniest line (to me, as a former high school teacher) is one Janis makes about Ms. Norbury when she spots her in a shopping mall: "I love seeing teachers outside of school. It's like seeing a dog walking on its hind legs."

Yes, the movie does have its fair share of laughs, which in context are funny: "I'm from Michigan," "Don't read ahead," "Don't have sex!," "Ashton Kutcher? Is that a band?" And "I'm kinda psychic. It's like I have ESPN or something."

A school-wide riot among the girls is also sort of funny, but then the film ends conventionally and turns into every other teen comedy we've ever seen. It's a shame, really. Where the movie is merely cute, it could have been tough. Where it's pleasantly amusing, it could have been outrageously hilarious. Where it's light and flabby, it could have been dark and mean. Like the wannabes at North Shore, "Mean Girls" longs to take a step beyond the ordinary, but it takes the easier, more traditional route instead.

John's film rating: 6/10

The Film According to Eddie:
Disney has been revisiting its vaults by churning out remakes of its live-action and animated movies. Sometimes, the Mouse House even makes animated versions of its live-action movies and vice versa. The young actress Lindsay Lohan has been a participant in these remakes, appearing in 1998's "The Parent Trap" as well as 2003's "Freaky Friday". Both movies were box-office winners, and although she hit a snag with "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen" (also a Disney product), she scored another hit with Paramount's "Mean Girls".

Now, it's obvious that "Mean Girls" was meant to be Lohan's step into "mature" roles, what with its denouncing social cliques in high schools as well as girl-on-girl hating. However, "Mean Girls" is a message movie of the worst kind. It bares its teeth looking for important targets but delivers a crowd-pleasing resolution that solves nothing and introduces highly implausible elements that essentially negate the movie's statements.

Consider the following:
1) A girl is hit by a bus and winds up with a shattered back. However, in less than a year, she manages to walk without any aids and even plays lacrosse, a physically demanding sport.
2) A girl takes responsibility for creating a vicious gossip book about her high school. Her "punishment" is to be grounded by a father who doesn't understand what being grounded means, to represent her school at a math competition, and to win the Spring Fling Queen vote. I don't know about you, but being punished and being socially ostracized never looked this good.