DVD/150: MEAN GIRLS (Mark Waters, 2004)

One of my favourite quartet of high-school comedies - joining HEATHERS, CLUELESS and TEN THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU - MEAN GIRLS has lost none of it's sarky bitchiness.

Cady, raised in Africa and home-schooled by her anthropologist parents, is back in the US and now faces a new dangerous terrain... high school.

Cady befriends 'outsiders' goth Janis and gay Damian who show her the different pupil cliques but warn her off talking to The Plastics: three girls whose superiority makes them disliked but feared.  

Intrigued by Cady, The Plastics invite her to sit with them at lunch and shop with them.  She soon realises that Karen and Gretchen are just dim courtiers to Queen Bitch Regina.

Damian and Janis encourage Cady to ingratiate herself with Regina so they can sabotage her for all her nastiness.

But can Cady tell the difference between playing a Plastic and becoming a Plastic?

Shelf or charity shop?  Cady and The Plastics are fighting it out in my ... um... plastic DVD storage box!  Lindsay Lohan shows what a talent she was before the tabloids got to her, she has a warm naturalness throughout and there are stand-out performances from Rachel McAdams as the ghastly Regina, Amanda Seyfried as uber-thick Karen and Lacey Chabert as the ultra-needy Gretchen.  Remarkably the basis for Tina Fey's very funny script was a non-fiction self-help book about surviving school cliques; Fey also co-stars as Cady's exasperated maths teacher.  Ultimately it fails against the all-conquering CLUELESS: the film cannot keep it's momentum going towards the end and the arc of nice girl seeming to turn bitchy isn't as interesting as CLUELESS' Valley Girl princess finding happiness isn't just an Azzadine Alaia wardrobe. MEAN GIRLS however is still fetch.  Sorry Regina!