Review of Mean Girls (2004) by Shane S — 18 Jul 2014

I forced myself to watch it because of all of the endless quoting that this film gets. I swear, if I had to read one more "WE SHOULD JUST TOTALLY STAB CAESAR" and "YOU GO GLEN COCO" reiteration, I would go nuts. I had to watch this to keep sane.

I think my life feels a little more satisfied now. A little more. Tina Fey's take on the high-school satire basically plays out like a less cynical and inadvertently homophobic version of Heathers, but it doesn't really lack a lot of the bite that Heathers has. While there aren't any really memorable sequences like "I LOVE MY DEAD GAY SON" and that deliberately horrible don't-kill-yourself-teenagers synth pop song, Mean Girls makes it up by having endlessly quotable lines. It's probably because Tina Fey decided to turn what would normally be a dark film about a girl who becomes so obsessed with popularity that she ends up becoming the one thing she despises into an outright comedy. It's the same reason why Heathers is hilarious: it's because these really bleak situations are shown to have comic potential. While, yeah, it's definitely nowhere near as thought-provoking as the best satires ever written, Tina Fey does show a lot of competence with the genre and makes a very admirable story.

But enough of that. Let's talk about Glen Coco - the best character in the movie. Nobody's every gotten four candygrams before - not since Black Bart invented the candygram in 1874 as part of "Operation Kill Mongo" - until Glen Coco came into the world and happened to be here in 2003 (I'm guessing this film takes place in 2003 since it did come out when I was in 6th grade - it was advertised EVERYWHERE). You go, Glen Coco. You go.