Mean Girls (2004)
Directed by Mark Waters
Cady Heron is a hit with The Plastics, the A-list girl clique at her new school, until she makes the mistake of falling for Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of alpha Plastic Regina George.
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34 films that influenced Mean Girls
What critics say influenced Mean Girls
The entire sub-genre was basically worked over in Heathers’ wake, with movies like Mean Girls and Jawbreaker and television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer depicting high school as a virtual (sometimes literal) hellscape — jaded, cynical, bitter little pills.
The early part of Mean Girls is like a mixture of Heathers (1989) and Goodfellas (1990), complete with breezy, journalistic narration: The nonconforming outcast Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan)—not the singer-songwriter but maybe a tribute to her—lays out the school's sundry cliques and draws a map of the segregated cafeteria.
Like Heathers with the edges filed down a bit...the kind of smooth, clever (and rare) entertainment that critics and audiences can all enjoy, guilt-free.
Sheâs hot, of course, so the Heathers â I mean, the Plastics (McAdams, Chabert, and Seyfried) â glom onto her.
The result is weirdly schizophrenic in tone; at times it seems like it wants to be a modern-day version of "Heathers" (which was written by Waterss brother, Daniel) and at other times, it seems content to be just another John Hughes knockoff.
I first heard Mean Girls described as Heathers without the killing.
Written by "SNL"'s Tina Fey and scoring with Waters' once-a-movie affection for paying tribute to Hitchcock (a pair of broken glasses here for Strangers on a Train/The Birds effect) and Tim Meadows' hilarious transformation into a bat-wielding Joe Clark, the picture is moderately entertaining every time it jumps the tracks.
Written by "SNL"'s Tina Fey and scoring with Waters' once-a-movie affection for paying tribute to Hitchcock (a pair of broken glasses here for Strangers on a Train/The Birds effect) and Tim Meadows' hilarious transformation into a bat-wielding Joe Clark, the picture is moderately entertaining every time it jumps the tracks.
Although Mean Girls is likely to be frequently compared to Heathers, and perhaps occasionally to Election , the movie it most strongly reminds me of is 1999's Jawbreaker .
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The early part of Mean Girls is like a mixture of Heathers (1989) and Goodfellas (1990), complete with breezy, journalistic narration: The nonconforming outcast Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan)—not the singer-songwriter but maybe a tribute to her—lays out the school's sundry cliques and draws a map of the segregated cafeteria.
"Mean Girls," directed by Mark Waters ("Freaky Friday") and written by Tina Fey ("Saturday Night Live"), resembles Amy Heckerling's terrific 1995 "Clueless" in its zingy wit and glossy look — and, like that movie, it holds many pleasures for those well out of their teens.
Mean Girls has the same fancifully dead-on tone as the 1995 high-school comedy Clueless without the sweetness because, hey, these snits are mean.
It falls short of the standard set by "Clueless" and "Heathers," but this teen comedy written by "Saturday Night Live's" Tina Fey is a funny and instructive blueprint of the cliques and social traumas teenagers experience in high school.
With its spoofy spirit, "Mean Girls" is too shallow to become a "Heathers" or "Clueless" for a new generation.
“Heathers” and “Clueless” both dealt with the beautiful kids in high school but the former film concentrated on mayhem while the Alicia Silverstone vehicle showed the sweeter side of girl cliques.
Well shy of classic, Mean Girls lacks both Heathers ' and Election 's commitment to its darker instincts and Clueless ' indelible characterizations, but it's still probably the best teen comedy in years, and certainly the best SNL movie since Tommy Boy .
If so, I�d say you must not have seen Beat the Devil (1953) or The Pride and the Passion (1958) or Blaze (1989).
Last week I blasted the crowd-pleasing hit movie "13 Going on 30" for being little more than a remake of "Big."
Just as the 1988 comedy "Big" became a smash after several similar projects made it seem perilously late, the unofficial remake called "13 Going on 30" shows signs of becoming a hit in the current teen-pic sweepstakes.
Mean Girls is the second big-studio comedy released in as many weeks to be engineered from 1980s teen-movie DNA: The ancestry of ''Heathers'' is evident in this sweet-tart comedy about female bitchiness in the high school jungle, just as ''Big'' leaves its genetic fingerprints on ''13 Going on 30.''
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Although Mean Girls is likely to be frequently compared to Heathers, and perhaps occasionally to Election , the movie it most strongly reminds me of is 1999's Jawbreaker .
If so, I�d say you must not have seen Beat the Devil (1953) or The Pride and the Passion (1958) or Blaze (1989).