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Mean Girls (Widescreen Edition) Customer Reviews (109 - 111 of 136 Reviews)

Danny DeVito! I love your work!
I received this movie as a gift, and it is one of those gifts that keep giving. I saw this twice in theaters, and thought it was decent, but I really loved it after watching it and it's features at home.

If you haven't heard, it's a story about highschool. Yawn, right? Yet, it's a wittier version of the hell we remember. It's the story of Cady Herron (Lohan), who just moved from Africa where her parents had set up their lifes research as zoologists and homeschooled Cady. Her first day of school, and she's being thrown into Highschool. After facing the Savanna and wild animals, she is about to face some of the best and worst; in her math class she meets some of the best. A large guy who's 'almost too gay to function' and his best friend Janice, a rumored lesbian and loner\artsy kid. They hit it off, and tell her where to go and who to avoid. But there is one group espically to avoid: The Plastics. Gretchen Weiners-the gossip (Lacy Chabert), Karen Smith-the dumb one (Amanda Seyford), and Regina George-the meanest (Rachel McAdams). But when Janice and Damien come up with a way for Cady to infiltrate The Plastics after they hit it off.

This story may seem pretty plain, and everyone claims it's 'innovative' (shigeru miyamoto?) or the best highschool satire. Well, if the only thing to compare it to is 'Not Another Teen Movie'... It's leaps and bounds ahead. It is smart AND funny, a pleasant surprise coming from SNL writers and producers (anymore, SNL is ridiculous... especially Fallon). And that's the other thing that people keep bringing up, and it's really true: Writer and star Tina Fey is amazing and the only funny thing on SNL, adding the perfect mix of real school experiences and basing the script off the non-fiction book 'Queen Bees and Wannabes' which is in its own right amazing. But it's not just the physical comedy and sight gags (the boob cutouts are hilarious!) it's the subtle dialouge. I can't stress how well written her script is. The only problem lies in the characters. Lohan's character follows her real life transformation from childhood actor and model to skanked out teen queen. The Plastics are good, but Chabert and Seyford are kind of cliche (dumb one, rich one) but their performances make up for it. McAdams doesn't have to act, all girls know what how to be a bitch. But Daniel Franzese (Damian) and Lizzy Caplan (Janis Ian) are where the movie really shine, as do all the background characters. No main character has as many funny lines as Amy Poehler, who plays the rich mom of Regina, making them margaritas and getting breast implants. So, if you can look at some two dimensional characters as satiracal, your good to go.

The special are nice for a teeny bopper comedy. We get a commentary between Director Mark Waters and Writer Tina Fey, with a few quips by Producer Lorne Michaels, where they talk about writing, high school, tech and the actors versus their characters. An above average commentary, I suggest it to anyone new to the dvd format (hermits and the elderly are likely the only ones) or someone who skips the features and leaves them for dead. Next, are deleted scenes, most cut because the gag didn't test well or time, most would have worked but Fey and Waters tell us why they ended up on the cutting room floor. Bloopers are on here, mostly funny flubbed lines and trips. Some featurettes round out the disc, starting with one called 'Only the Strong Survive', a making of type. Next, one called 'The Politics of Girl World', this one focuses on the message of the film and the influence from the book. Finally 'Plastic Fashion', which is about exactly that, the wardrobe of the movie.

Despite Lindsay Lohan, who hasn't made a great movie since 'Parent Trap', everyone else shines, and Fey's script cuts to the center of what highschool was all about. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, and popularity won't matter any more.

A great movie that tween girls might need to see, and teen girls may want to. Anyone who has been in highschool from the 80's onward will enjoy this modern telling of the school outcast turned school celebrity.

"Girl World" and Socialization in High School
Mean Girls starring Lindsay Lohan, is the mostly lighthearted story of an attractive homeschooled girl's first year in public school, her rise to "the top" of the high school social ladder. For those expecting a typical teen flick it will probably be above expectations, while those expecting something deep or politically activist will be disappointed. Lohan gives a solid enough performance yet it's the supporting cast that really carries this movie.

At the heart, however, this film is about "girl world." As Cady emerges from the Africa she has seen the raw struggle of life by brute force. Yet to come of age (or in this case, to win over her crush Aaron), Cady must learn the rules of struggle in the human, civilized world, so her parents send her to school to "socialize" her. She begins not with an a priori desire to do either good or evil. Rather, her transformation into a bitch, a "mean girl", stems from no more than the possession of desire ("But I wanted things to move faster. So I followed my instincts"). -- and the realization that the object of her desire is not free. Cady must solve a dilemma that goes to the heart of civilization, a dilemma for which men have created property rights and markets, social institutions, laws and moral values, and most of all politics, the question of how to attain the results she wants--how to gain power-- without directly applying force.

Yes, this is girl world and not boy world, though women are no more civilized than men. The physically and formally weaker gender, women have faced Cady's dilemma for perhaps millions of years before Hammurabi's vaunted Code of Laws-- and even afterwards-- and have often been forced to play it more skillfully than their stronger counterparts. One cannot help but sense that ancient truth somehow influencing even the most modern world of North Shore High. As Cady learns to work in the subtleties of socialization, with its rules, manipulations, and using her sexual appeal, she eventually rises to the top of "girl world": playing it amazingly coolly: silent, innocent, looking away even as her sinisterly manipulated minions (Gretchen and Karen) play out a proxy struggle over the telephone, then kick Regina out of their lunch table. She has won the "sneaky" war, the battle of wits and emotions.

Yet Cady's inevitable epiphany is not that she has been "mean" as she is accused by Damian and Janis, her friends, which takes the title of this film. It is not the guilt trip from what she did to Ms. Nobury. It is not Regina being injured by a bus. Nor, no doubt to the everlasting disappointment of some people who love to criticize yet have very few solutions, is it some kind of profound rejection of materialism or "corporate values." No, at the end of the day, when she is standing on the stage with the two greatest awards that society can award a child-- the proxy prize for most social (informal) power, "spring fling queen", and the proxy prize for most future economic (formal) power, "Mathlete champion", which of these two greatest awards is the most important? The question is not "which is real power" but which is easier for Cady-- and which is still to be sought? By learning the "rules of the game", Cady has inculcated herself into the universe of social relations-- she has become successfully "socialized", as her parents desired, and the spring fling crown is no longer necessary as an affirmation. What is more important to her now is the medal around her neck, the future that she will be working for in college and beyond.

And this, in many ways, is the objective of high school. High school is not where one earns one's formal station in life, one's monetary security or professional satisfaction. When the North Shore teens grow older, it will be presidents, soldiers, and CEOs who will command attention, "Mean Guys", not "Mean Girls", guys who wield the formal power of institutions, will be the protagonists in the movies that we see.

But we are not yet there, we are at high school, at discovery of self within the context of society, about how to navigate human relations to seize the object of desire. The tools that we develop along the way to move this process forward-- cliques, rules, manipulations, gossip, materialism and shallowness, backstabbing, overall "meanness" are no trivial pursuits. They represent eternal truths of life that do not go away as we enter adulthood, and essential tools for those (both male and female) who have lacked or needed to augment formal power. The true scars, then, come not from the temporary battle wounds of mutual bitchiness but the breakdown of the process of social education. And the true shame, which is not truly covered in this film's neat ending, is the sad consequences of the all-too-often failure of this process, of the people who never socialize successfully.

"I knew how this would be settled in the animal world... but this was girl world. In girl world, all the fighting had to be sneaky."

Starts out with an interesting premise.
Ends up just another vacuous "teen" flick with about as much realism as the brothers Grimm. Skip it unless you're bored.

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