Paramount (USA)
1.78:1 1080p
96 minutes
Audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1 English, DD 5.1 French, DD 5.1 Spanish
Subtitles: Optional English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese
Extras: audio commentary; Only the Strong Survive; The Politics of Girl World; Plastic Fashion; Word Vomit; So Fetch (deleted/extended scenes); interstitials; trailers
Released: 14 April 2009
It’s obvious that Mean Girls was meant to be Lindsay Lohan’s step into relatively “mature” roles after a string of Disney family movies. However, Mean Girls is a message movie of the worst kind. It bares its teeth looking for important targets but delivers a crowd-pleasing resolution that solves nothing and introduces highly implausible elements that essentially negate the movie’s statements.
Consider the following:
1) A girl is hit by a bus and winds up with a shattered back. However, in less than a year, she manages to walk without any aids and even plays lacrosse, a physically demanding sport.
2) A girl takes responsibility for creating a vicious gossip book about her high school. Her “punishment” is to be grounded by a father who doesn’t understand what being grounded means, to represent her school at a math competition, and to win the Spring Fling Queen vote. I don’t know about you, but being punished and being socially ostracized never looked this good.
3) Three average-looking actresses are supposed to play the glamazons of a high school. In my experience, it takes more than just revealing clothes and lots of make-up to be social queens--it takes real physical beauty to rule a campus. (Yeah, maybe the moviemakers were trying to make a point about how glamorous bitches aren’t really that pretty but are only perceived to be pretty, but seriously, none of the actresses who are this movie’s glamazons are conventionally attractive.)
The movie’s first half is its best as the screenplay delivers fresh ways of making the usual jokes about certain high school social groups. There’s also one of the best visual gags that I’ve seen in a long time, that of Lindsay Lohan dressing up as a bloody bride from the grave with really bad teeth. However, the movie goes downhill when it introduces one of the Plastics’ moms; she’s so dumb that she’s a miscalculation. Sure, the movie is not “realistic”, but that mom is a wild caricature that belongs in another movie.
The laughs also become labored, repetitive, and uninspired. For instance, the line “He’s too gay to function” is repeated incessantly, regardless of whether characters mean well or ill. Also, Cady tells one girl to eat a lot of nutrition bars. The girl thinks that the bars will help her lose weight, but the bars actually make people gain weight. The payoff to the joke arrives so much later after the joke is first told that it’s just not funny, period.
At some points, the movie forgets that it’s a comedy and veers into dark territory, complete with severe repercussions for some of the characters (including the aforementioned bus-hitting-a-girl incident). In fact, sometimes, I was reminded of Gossip, a thriller about vicious college students telling lies about each other. The enterprise never recovers a balance in tone and purpose, and its all’s-well-that-ends-well ending is trash that is too sugary, too Hollywood, and too commercial for the moviemakers to claim any ounce of integrity.
Girls shouldn’t hate on girls--true. Tina Fey shouldn’t have hated on so many girls with her sell-out of a screenplay.
Video:
As with other Paramount Blu-ray editions of recent catalog titles, this title’s 1.78:1 1080p image is a bit soft and has obvious source defects that weren’t removed. There is some print damage, and mosquito noise rears its head from time to time.
Audio:
The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 English track is appropriately bouncy and festive, though the rear channels have little to do. The front soundstage is comfortably wide, but since this isn’t an action extravaganza, you won’t hear fancy directionality effects or authoritative bass.
Extras:
There’s an audio commentary by director Mark Waters, screenwriter and actress Tina Fey, and producer Lorne Michaels. This is the kind of track that I dread--one with everyone talking about how great everybody else is. Three featurettes--“Only the Strong Survive”, “The Politics of Girl World”, and “Plastic Fashion”--look at various aspects of the production as well as some of the real-life inspiration for ideas used in the movie. “Word Vomit” is the DVD’s blooper reel, and in “So Fetch”, you get a few minutes’ worth of deleted/extended scenes with optional audio commentary by Waters and Fey. Finally, there are three “interstitials” (TV commercials) and a theatrical trailer.
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