July 26, 2004
Mean Girls
How many movie reviews do I preface with the words, "Don't laugh - yes, I saw this movie."? Well, here's another one. Don't laugh - yes, I saw this movie.
My interest in Mean Girls developed from my love of the movie Heathers, in which a regular girl takes down the popular clique, basically by killing them all. Mean Girls is definitely not as evil, but the bitches are definitely bitches! And they get taken down in a fairly creative way: infiltration - become the ones you despise.
Mean Girls reminded me a lot of Saved!, actually, because there was a girl who was friends with the popular clique as well as a couple of outcast friends, and somehow it all ends at prom. Doesn't every high school movie? Also, both movies ended with an actual moral of sorts. In Mean Girls, the conclusion is that giving someone a hard time doesn't make one's life any better or easier. There are lots of apologies and - not necessarily convincingly - the Plastics (bitchy popular clique) and the normal kids get along at the end of the movie. In Heathers, all the popular bithces were dead, so there wasn't a chance for a moral to the story. Ha ha.
One interesting take on this movie was the main character's background. As she lived in Africa her entire life with her zoologist parents, she viewed her classmates a lot like viewing wild animals in their habitats. There are actual scenes of teenagers in the mall and at prom, acting like chimps or other animals. I thought it was amusing.
All in all, Mean Girls was surprisingly good. The mean girls are sufficiently mean, the jokes occur often and are usually funny, the parents aren't simply unknowing idiots, and there's a lot more substance than the majority of the teen movies out there. Fun movie.
Posted by wendytime at July 26, 2004 12:13 PM | TrackBack