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Mean Girls
(2004)
Dir: Mark Waters
Let’s have a slumber party! You can teach me French braids and I’ll tell you what it was like when I let Jeff McHently get to third base (squishy). Cotton panties, nail polish remover, Seventeen Magazine, gossip, gossip, and gossip (and more cotton panites, if possible.) Damnit I love teenage girls, like, tly luv ‘em!!!!
Watching Mark Water’s Mean Girls has gleefully reignited my wholesome, admittedly sexual, but innocently sexual, obsession with socially conniving, youthful females. These girls are one hundred times more adept at traversing the social scene than I am or ever will be. Their capacity for double talk alone rivals that in some of the greatest literature of the western world. An ability to grasp and adapt to the ever changing universe of adolescence makes me plain envious. Do I have a gender-identity problem? I’d certainly give up a lot to have Lindsay Lohan’s breasts, if even for fifteen minutes. Alas, an inside out penis is ridiculous and as I’m well into my twenties, I could never be a teen girl. But one of the reasons we go to the movies is to pretend we’re someone else, right? So come on, let’s do have that slumber party.
Mean Girls is a fairly conventional and predictable teen comedy, yet Tina Fey’s script provides ample intelligence and surprise to hold interest. My sister’s boyfriend, not know to enjoy films in need of car chases, was laughing out loud and I was down right giddy. A couple of lame sight gags and stale jokes are quickly forgotten amongst the wit, sincerity and multi-dimensionality of most of the characters. The plot comes to climax in a surreal and hilarious outburst of high school violence. It’s a school wide brawl incited by the malicious gossip of the most popular group of girls, complete with a Joe Clark-like Principal (played by Tim Meadows), wielding a baseball bat and cursing the day he left “the Southside.” The genre isn’t exactly undergoing a face-lift, but maybe some highlights and a shorter skit.
Oh, and the girls! Rachel McAdams is cute. Amanda Seyfried is cute. Lindsay Lohan (have you seen her in June’s Vanity Fair?) is double cute. The dudes in the movie are cute. The pink sweaters and those short shirts are cute. Even the over-age women in this movie, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, are cute. Jesus, it’s all so cute, that I want to start driving a Jetta.
I will be revisiting teen girl land for the upcoming Jena Malone movie, Saved. I’m going to see it opening weekend. Shit, I might even camp out for tickets as long as my cramps aren’t acting up.
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