Mean Girls [2004] [DVD]

Product Information

Mean Girls is packing such a great cast and a cacklingly satirical sense of humor that it's kind of a drag that it sputters near the end. Celebrate the 15th Anniversary of Mean Girls in style with the official limited edition ‘Burn Book’ collector’s box.

High school's about as brutal and unforgiving as anything Cady had seen in the steaming jungles a couple continents over, and she quickly learns that there are the gazelles -- y'know, the arty, outcast types like Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and her too-gay-to-function shadow (Daniel Franzese) -- and the lions that are tearing them into bloody, fist-sized chunks. Cady, who in the meantime has become friends with punky misfits Janis and Damian, starts to get close to the 'mean girls', initially out of curiosity - but it isn't long before she's enjoying the buzz of being one of the most popular girls in the school. When Cady falls for Regina's ex-boyfriend, though, the Queen Bee is stung - and she schemes to ruin Cady's social future. There are an awful lot of rules that go along with a prime spot in Girl World, but Cady rolls with the punches pretty well.Recently, we've done several changes to help out this wiki, from deleting empty pages, improving the navigation, adding a rules page, as well as merging film infoboxes.

Pretty much all of the highlights are the random notes they lob out: nicking the template for Regina from Glengarry Glen Ross, Amy Poehler stepping in as a rap coach, the lack of an umlaut in der Svedish language, slathering digital chocolate onto Rachel McAdams' teeth, and having to shoot their own skeevy Girls Gone Wild video. Y'know, get someone on in the inside who could flip the Plastics over and expose their taut, well-toned, but vulnerable little underbellies.A few scattered scenes like those keep the rear channels chattering, but Mean Girls is a dialogue-driven flick, so its 24-bit TrueHD track lets the front speakers do most of the heavy lifting. There's a half-battalion of SNL alums on the payroll too, but it's Tim Meadows that winds up stealing every last scene he's in as the brow-beaten principal. I'll probably look back at this somewhere down the line and wish I'd hammered out a better comparison, but my kneejerk reaction is that Mean Girls is an awful lot like a Lily Allen song: cute and bubbly on the outside, sure, but there's a fanged sense of humor and an almost subversive wit lurking underneath.