Movie Reviews

One of the reasons I might've enjoyed Mean Girls so much was because I saw it in Anaheim, California, during my Disneyland vacation. But trying to put that aside, I'm still pretty sure it was a really good, very funny movie.

Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) spent most of her school years travelling around the world with her zoologist parents, and private home-schooling was how she was educated. After moving back to America permanently, however, she's thrown unprepared into a senior grade in a public high-school. She befriends with two "social outcasts": Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese). At the same time, she is intrigued by a clique of girls named The Plastics -- slutty bimbos who are, deservingly or not, the most popular girls in the school. The Plastics take a curious liking in Cady, and, for fun, Cady Janis and Damian decide that Cady should work her way into the clique of The Plastics and report back to them all the bizarre and mean things that they do.

That's the basic storyline, but there's a fair bit more to it. It sounds a little uninspired, but the film's writing is excellent. I certainly wouldn't say that Mean Girls is a realistic depiction of high-school society -- it's more of a "hyper-real" and slightly-exaggerated depiction of the characteristics attributed to all of the various groups and cliques in Cady's high-school (and just about everybody else's too, probably). The slight exaggerations of all the different cliques made it easy (and funny) thinking about my own experiences and various people I knew that would've best fit into certain groups.

Mean Girls is well-written and very funny. Thankfully, it also avoids a lot of clichés that it could've easily resorted to. It's definitely worth seeing.