Review of Mean Girls (2004) by Cameron H — 02 Sep 2014

No more high school comedies for a while. I am in college now. Lindsay Lohan is your standard clique-less girl who enters her new school as a naive junior. She starts to bond with the popular "plastic" girls, led by Rachel McAdams, but when McAdams wrongs Lohan on the personal level, it's payback time.

Lohan tries to tear down the regime of the plastics, only to become one herself. She then explicitly states, through a first-person narrative, that high school becomes much easier to bear when there are no cliques.

Hey, it's for high school students. Tina Fey is not doing any harm by writing a screenplay that not-too-subtly encourages communication. Mean Girls is sometimes funny. There are a few dumb blonde jokes and other cheap shots, but I can see why people like to quote it.

I cannot back that statement up with an example, at the moment. The first-person narration can be a bit too preachy, like when the American high school students are compared to wild African animals. Social commentary is appreciated, but not necessary.

I do like how Lohan's mind changes its own strategies for when dealing with similar, stressful circumstances. Mean Girls may not have a special place in my heart the way that it does for my peers, but I had a good time, looking back at my younger self and thinking how silly it was to get caught up in dumb drama.