Mean Girls

The film that I chose to write about is a Paramount Pictures presentation titled Mean Girls, starring Lindsay Lohan and also featuring a handful of Saturday Night Live cast members, including Tina Fey the author of this picture. The reason behind choosing this film is because it has a unique style of introducing characters, transitioning between scenes, and various tools to help spice up the film. Being one of my personal favorites, Mean Girls is a comedy about a home schooled teenage girl who enters high school for the first time. She tries to figure herself out by where she can fit in and who she needs to become friends with.

Cady Heron is the main character (played by Lohan) who narrates through out the movie. She spent her whole childhood living in Africa with her zoologist's parents, until she is 15 when she moved to America to enter high school. From here Cady is introduced to a whole new environment made up of social cliques. Like every teenager, popularity is desired, which Cady gets her fair share of by the end of the flick. Though a tough road to get there, she ends up finding herself in the end, and making it a bit easier for everyone along the way.

Throughout the movie, interesting editing and different types of filming techniques are used to emphasize the feel for the scene. In the opening act, the camera spices things up right away by focusing on something, then making it look like a picture was just taken and the scene freezes as Cady narrates what's happening. In her first few days of school, flashbacks of her African experiences and memories come into view by teenagers being obnoxious and what not. Flashbacks of these African scenes go on through the entire movie and are always introduced by a fast-paced pounding drum beat. Another common technique that was used in the production was whenever the "Queen Bee", or the most popular flawless girl appeared on screen, she would be accompanied by party music, 'hot' music, dance music, etc.

For the judgment, criticism, and interpretation aspects I feel this film was a good pick because the angle it approaches is a blown out of proportion version of high school girl drama. Starting with the easiest to loom, judgment is used from beginning to end, being the base of the picture. The first to befriend Cady at her new school are Janis and Damien, the "unique art freaks", as others describe. They kindly show her around, and inform her of what is cool and what isn't. The Lunchroom is the most important, in that being where you sit is your social status, or your clique - they have the nerds, Asian nerds, jocks, varsity jocks, burn-outs, girls who eat their feelings, girls who eat nothing, sexually active band geeks, the Plastics, art freaks, and more. Just by reading the names of the different cliques, you can see emphases toward judgment and criticism that was used. If you are not in a certain clique, then you are not liked by or spoken to by that clique. Janis informs all of this to Cady the same day that the gorgeous Plastics, consisting of Regina- the Bratty Queen Bee-