The film I am reviewing is Mean Girls. It was released on 30th April 2004 in the USA, and was directed by Mark Waters.
Mean Girls is set in an American high school with the main theme focusing on popularity, not fitting in to the popular teenage girls' way of life, and therefore becoming an outcast. The film addresses issues that teenage girls can relate to such as image, sexuality, friendship, conformity, individuality which appeals to the target audience of teenage girls aged 13+.
Mean Girls deals with these themes in a light hearted way to make it more entertaining, exaggerating characters and stereotypes. For the film to be successful, it relies on its audience having struggled with either dealing with the pressures of popularity or being at the bottom of the social ladder in high school. The reason the film was so successful, and still is, is because popularity within school will always exist. It's an issue teenage girls will always be able to relate to.
Mean Girls star is Lindsay Lohan, she plays the main character Cady. I think Lindsay Lohan was a great choice for the main character as she would bring in more teenage girls to watch the film, as many of us had seen her when we were younger in films such as 'The Parent Trap' and also another teen comedy 'Freaky Friday' which was released the year before Mean Girls.
The film was produced by a major production company Paramount Pictures which I think helped with its popularity, as it would have had a big budget to work with to hire well known actresses such as Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried and Rachel McAdams.
The genre of Mean Girls is a comedy. Typically comedies follow similar conventions to ensure the audience knows what to expect to a certain degree. For example, Mean Girls is set in a high school, as are many other teen comedies. This is because the location is relevant to the narrative.
Comedy films usually star comedians as well. The comedienne Tina Fey wrote the screenplay for and starred in Mean Girls. Mean Girls heavily focuses on stereotypes, as do a lot of comedies, but what makes Mean Girls funny is the over-exaggeration of high school cliques.
Mean Girls follows the journey of Cady Heron who has moved from being homeschooled in Africa to suddenly being thrown into an American high school with unwritten social rules she has never had to deal with before. She has to decide which clique to be friends with, as it's not okay to be friends with everyone and you have to assign yourself to a certain group, and if you don't, then you have no friends at all.
The main characters in Mean Girls fall under the cliques of 'Plastics' and 'Art Freaks'.
'The Plastics' consist of Gretchen Wieners and Karen Smith, two 'dumb' girls who follow the manipulative ring leader: Regina George.
The Plastics nearly always wear pink, are self obsessed, and only associate themselves with people who will bring them social gratification.
Their opposite are the 'Art Freaks' who are Janis Ian and the "almost too gay to function" Damian Leigh. Damian is instantly in a minority category by being gay, and Janis is in a minority category by the way she dresses. She has lots of piercings and black hair and heavy makeup, which is not seen as 'cool' or the way the popular people dress.
One of my favourite scenes in the film is when Janice says: “Now, where you sit in the cafeteria is crucial, because you got everybody there. You got your Freshmen, ROTC Guys, Preps, J.V Jocks, Asian Nerds, Cool Asians, Varsity Jocks, Unfriendly Black Hotties, Girls Who Eat Their Feelings, Girls Who Don’t Eat Anything, Desperate Wannabes, Burnouts, Sexually Active Band Geeks…” while the camera shows each group of people sitting at a table in the canteen, giving a visual to the cliques name. It highlights how ridiculous and judgemental high school can be, that you have to fit into a category, and if you don't then you don't belong.
Throughout the film there are lots of references to animalistic behaviour which Cady is used to as she used to live in Africa. She compares the 'Girl World' of high school to the animal world in Africa - how girls can be ruthless like wild beasts. There's a scene where girls are arguing then suddenly the sound of a lion's roar can be heard while a girl lunges for another girl. This highlights how vicious girls words can be without even having to hear any human dialogue.
I really enjoyed this film because even though it's a comedy and plays with stereotypes and over-the-top characters, it conveys an important message about how ridiculous it is to put yourselves in categories and not be who you really are for fear of other peoples judgement. Cady says an important line towards the end of the film which really stands out to me: “Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier. Calling somebody stupid won’t make you any smarter. And ruining Regina George’s life definitely didn’t make me any happier. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you."
