MEAN GIRLS - A Review

These are obviously the coolest kids on campus. Why are you so stupid, high schoolers? 

I want to get this out of the way: Although I was a junior in high school when the first movie came out, I did not worship at the altar of Mean Girls. I didn't see it until its DVD release, liked it well enough, but didn't return to it for a decade. Those two screenings didn't leave much of an impression. I remember a kid at the beginning talking about God giving us guns to fight "the dinosaurs and the homosexuals" (biting satire for a progressive kid educated at a small Christian K-12), and a strong focus on cliques (which we didn't really have in said Christian K-12 of maybe 600 students). But mostly I remember it making me feel bad, because everyone in the 2004 movie was so terrible to each other. I still found it funny and appreciated the callbacks in social circles (mostly yelled phrases like "She doesn't even go here!" or "You can't sit with us!"), but the Mean part of the title was a little too accurate.

This could all explain why I liked this, the fourth-ish (It was a parenting book?) iteration of the story and a translation of the Broadway hit, better than the original. It probably reads as basic or declawed to fans of the 2004 version, but I found it to be more empathetic than its cinematic predecessor. Partially because the core performances don't come across as sinister, partially because I am now in my 30s and no longer fear running into any of these characters in the real world, and largely because, yes, the musical is way less aggressive than the non-musical. And that's for the best.

Top 10 of 2023

May December, the kind of character study that turns questions like "When do you think she'll start doing the lisp?" into high drama, is my pick for best of the year.

Every year is a great year for cinema, and we should stop pretending it isn't. Instead, I propose we focus on how the cinema was great in the given year. 2023 was a volatile year for filmmaking, yes, but another way to put that would be it was a subversive year. We saw the WGA and SAG go toe-to-toe with the major studios and come out on top. Rather than compete, we saw the summer's two biggest films triumph as a most unlikely double feature. Sequels and superhero movies were largely rejected by audiences, instead favoring original stories. While it was falling victim to that trend, Disney tossed away Sound of Freedom and a smaller studio turned it into the most successful money-laundering scheme of the year... It's been a year of unexpected change. Not all good, but undeniably subversive.