Every mother of a 12 year old girl should sit down and watch Mean Girls. It is the fictional representation of the great book, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence by way of Tina Fey, who morphed it into a really funny, penetrating movie.
Mean Girls doesn’t preach hatin’. In fact, it does anything but – it even sympathizes with the mean girls rather than indulge some of our need to take down the pretty and popular girls. All the same, there are mean girls in high school. It is just the way things are. Boys are silly and immature and girls tend to get mean. This meanness isn’t something they understand. But it is there. It is partly the power that comes along with being really beautiful. In the teenage world, being pretty elevates you to the top of the tribe. Having eyes on you, girls copying you, boys drooling over you – you have to hold back or else everyone would want everything you have.
Nonetheless, there really is no excuse most of the time for how mean girls can be. Mean Girls takes this on by having its heroine, Katy (Lindsay Lohan), go from being an innocent homeschool kid morphed into a “plastic,” one of the “popular” girls. She discovers how easy it is to become one of them.
By the end of the film, though, there is much understanding. The bad girls take responsibility for how mean they’ve been, and Katy realizes that being herself is the better road.
All in all, a great way to send my daughter into 7th grade.
The acting is perfect across the board. It’s interesting to see how Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried launched soaring careers after this film. Lindsay Lohan had it all. But she steered that car right into a tree. And poor Gretchen Weiners. Things didn’t take off for her.
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