Director: Mark S. Waters
Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Tim Meadows, Ana Gasteyer, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Lizzy Caplan, Lacey Chabert, Jonathan Bennett

- Reviewed by Linda

While watching Mean Girls I found myself distracted during the film, thinking, "This is a Vickie movie." It's like a soft-core Heathers... like it should have been, well, meaner than it was. You can't go and throw a perfectly good title like Mean Girls on to a movie, and not PUT OUT, know what I mean? I want cursing. I want cat fights. I want cruelty that makes you go, "OUCH!" as opposed to, "Tee hee!" Strangely enough, it turns out that the director Mark S. Waters is the brother of Daniel Waters, who, lo and behold, wrote... Heathers. Is it really a kinder, gentler nation than it was 15 years ago? Or are we just too afraid to show how really mean high schoolers can be?

I guess with moon-faced Lindsey Lohan as the star, she can't have such dark tendencies as, say, Winona Ryder (in her one film of glory). Lindsey is too cute and nice to be a total dork or outcast. In a worst cast scenario, Lindsey is a pseudo-Band-nerd, but I can't imagine that she has ever been tossed in a garbage can or given a swirlie. In fact, as the new girl, her "dorky" homeschooled-in-Africa character Cady is almost immediately adopted by The Plastics (i.e. The Heathers), the "popular" clique of girls, because she's cute. That doesn't leave for much dramatic tension, as she drifts away from her "real" friends (a goth girl and a gay boy) whom she became best friends with FIRST, in, like, 10 minutes. The Goth and The Gay are pushed aside for the entire school year, in favor of "spying" on The Plastics.

The Goth and The Gay. I think that would be a great name for a band. [Note to self...]

Anyways, Mean Girls is middling-cute, and offers a few chuckles and only one guffaw (at least in my screening... but I won't tell you what joke is, except that it is a one-liner delivered by The Gay). You know exactly how it will end as soon as it starts, and from then on, it is just a matter of waiting to get there.

None of the actors are bad, and some even rise above the rather safe material (Tina Fey, you can be so much more... wicked!). I got a hoot out of Rajiv Surendra everytime he appeared on screen as a bad-ass Math Team nerd, and I wish that Lizzy Caplan as The Goth got to have more of a pointy tongue than she was given. Tina Fey herself appears as the Math teacher slash conscience of Cady, and has a couple glimpses of greatness (including a scene where she runs into some of her students at the mall, while wearing a TGIFriday's vest from her second job)... but even Tina can't spark up the proceedings.

There wasn't really anything specifically wrong with Mean Girls, except, well, I was kind of bored. Maybe I'm not as young at heart as I thought I was. Maybe I just like my high school comedies BLACK, i.e. Election. Or maybe I'm just jaded.

(Apologetic shrug.)

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