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Girls will be girls
Mean Girls stands out by being a little different than the other teen chick flicks; focus on 'a little.'

Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Ana Gasteyer
Directors: Mark S. Waters

Reviewed by Kevin Cunningham

THE PITCH: A new girl in school with no pop culture sensibility gets sucked into the high school world, and quickly does like the Romans: she becomes a bitch. IN OTHER WORDS: Clueless meets the Budweiser Catfight Girls.

The world of teen comedies has become an incredibly crowded field of sparse enjoyment. For the past 10 or so years, they have devolved into jokes devoid of any subtlety and humor injected largely through random stupidity draped loosely around 'plots' that would barely qualify as 'themes' in any proper storytelling class. Teenaged chick flicks are, of course, the worst, with the plot being roughly the same in each one: the outcast clique are pitted against the bitchy popular clique while flirting with possibly becoming one of them, and either gets the guy by finishing the transformation or by converting the guy from the popular crowd, amidst incredibly exaggerated stereotypes that would make perfect targets for the ACLU should they actually care.

Enter Mean Girls. Yes, a large part of the script is the outcast clique pitting themselves agaiinst the popular clique. And yes, the guy is to be gotten. But Mean Girls manages to stand out by exposing the hypocrisy inherent in such films: that the outcasts are no different from the populars. They are just as bitchy and mean, they just subscribe to a different cult of cool. That in itself is enough of an improvement for this film to stand out against it's peers and get it's good grade.

This cast is headed by the capable Lindsay Lohan, who is coming off a popularity surge from Freaky Friday that has been strong enough to make people largely forget Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. It's almost too easy to lump her in with the deluge of teenaged (or recently teenaged) actresses vying to be the class president of Hollywood High. It's awfully reminiscent of the teen pop wave a few years ago, though that may possibly be because a large part of the deluge are graduates from that pop music wave (Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Christina Milian), and the majority of the rest are crossing the other way into pop music (both Hilary Duff and Lohan have albums now). However, Lohan may be the most talented actress of the group. Or perhaps that's just because she's had better roles. Enjoy her now, because the future only holds films entitled Dramarama and Gossip Girl (I kid you not), with another unpromising sequel to Herbie The Love Bug sandwiched inbetween. Someone get this girl a new agent, because she is much better than this.

However, Lohan isn't the lone act in this film. She's got a good cast around her, and often the supporting players steal the scenes. Her nemesis is played capably by Rachel McAdams, who was last seen having her body hijacked by Rob Schneider in The Hot Chick. The other 'Plastics' are done by Amada Seyfried, perhaps the most entertaining stupid girl in a very long time, and Lacey Chabert, who may very well be the most talented, or at least the least annoying, of the Party of Five kids (barring a comeback by the kid that played the baby brother). Chabert, whose voice has finally caught up with the rest of her body and matured, is no longer an annoying squeaky kid, and steals a number of the scenes she's in. Anyone that missed her parodying her former co-star Jennifer Love Hewitt in the spoof Not Another Teen Movie should see that. She's one of the few people from that show I'd like to see more of in movies. Follow that group up with a couple of SNL alumni, Tim Meadows as the inept principal and Tina Fey (who also wrote the script) as the almost dorky but scarily realistic math teacher, and you've got a talented and underappreciated cast.

The one group of supporting characters that fails this film is the outcasts. Lizzy Caplan plays the girl best friend of Lohan's, but seems to eager for revenge to ever be believable. Then there's the gay guy best friend of hers, who incredibly has a lot of gags to try and make him look gay which fall flat. Someone needs to watch a little Will & Grace to figure out which gay stereotypes are in and which are out.

And the stereotypes, unfortunately, are the weakness of this film. Despite being in many ways more intelligent than most teen comedies, this one still falls into the kinds of traps that would offend even the most un-PC people. It's nice to see that there is now two stereotypes for Asian kids (The cool ones as opposed to the geeky and weird ones), but it seems that Indians are now the race that wants to be black, instead of suburban white kids. Great.

At least there wasn't a pointless black character walking around going ìThat is whack!î He'd be right, but I don't need to be reminded of it.

Still, Mean Girls is a step above it's genre, just for recognizing one of the hypocrisies that it lives on. Perhaps it'll have the same rejuvenating effect on it's genre that the Scream movies did for horror. For the sake of all the teen girl actresses out there, they'd better hope so. Something tells me most of them wouldn't survive the jump to any other genre of film. I just hope Lohan is one of the few who actually tries it-someday.

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