Mean Girls.

Continuing with my current trend of watching movies targeted to the young teenage audience, I dragged a couple of friends to watch Mean Girls. Now, I actually had a good reason for this, and it wasn't that I'm trying to regress to my high school days. First of all, the screenplay was written by Tina Fey, of Saturday Night Live fame. I'm a huge fan, and SNL has definitely gotten tons better recently - maybe it has to do something with the fact that she is head writer now? Who knows. Also, it was based on Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman, which I had always meant to read but unfortunately never gotten around to. The book is actually more of a "help manual" on how to deal with teenage girls as they go through that horrible stage of adolescence, and how to help them maneuver cliques, gossip, guys, etc. Ripe fodder for a satire.

The plot, basically, is as follows: Cady Heron (Lindsey Lohan) is a very pretty junior in high school who up 'til this point, had been home schooled in Africa. She is immediately adopted by the Plastics, the clique composed of three A-list girls, who are all pretty, rich and naturally incredibly desired/envied by the rest of the junior class. This clique is lead by the Queen Bee, Regina George (Rachel McAdams), who is incredibly mean, and everyone cowers in fear/awe in her presence. Unfortunately, Cady thinks that Regina's ex-boyfriend is cute. Obviously, Regina is not okay with it, and what follows is a whole bunch of secrecy, back-stabbing, and just plain ol'-fashioned meanness, teenage-style, including a hilarious nod to the current low-card dieting trend. Naturally, there is a happy ending that just borders on cloying, but saved from this potential fate by a runaway bus.

But it's not as saccharine as it could have been - there is definitely a sharp edge to the plot. The aforementioned runaway bus, for instance, shows up several times, to drive home (haha!) a point. There are quite a few roles played by past and present SNL cast, and those are all pretty comical, from Tina Fey as a recently-divorced calculus teacher, to Tim Meadows as the high school principal enamoured with Fey's character, to Amy Poehler as Regina's still-wanna-be-young mom. The Plastics themselves are actually very well acted, from Queen Bee Regina's sense of entitlement to Gretchen's (Lacey Chabert) sad desperation in trying to keep herself Regina's best friend, to Kylie's (Nicole Crimi) absolute ditziness. And then there's Cady, with her impossibly perfect eyebrows (where did she learn how to groom her eyebrows in the wilderness?), who upends the way high school used to be, transforming the cliques into accepting groups. How heartwarming.

This movie was definitely a good way to spend the afternoon. Much better than that piece of crap I saw last weekend, 13 Going On 30. It was enjoyable and made me glad that my high school - at least to my knowledge! - wasn't like that. Someday, I'll get off this kick of watching teeny-bopper movies and return to more "grown-up" films, but as long as the movie studios keep churning out this stuff, I'm gonna be watching it.