Swamp thing (7/25/07)
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Mean Girls. [Mark Waters, 2004. Written by Tina Fey; based loosely upon
Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman.]
Homeschooled honey Lindsay Lohan, like Tarzan raised in Africa, and only returned to civilization [or Evanston, Illinois, at any rate] to enter the educational system for the first time at the age of sixteen, is thrust wholly unprepared into the parlous environment of the American high school, a teeming hothouse fraught with predatory beasts, slithering constrictors, noxious insects, and flesh-eating plants; whose watering-hole, a lunchtime cafeteria, is turbulent with the contentions of alien tribes with inscrutable rituals, skins decorated in bizarre patterns, weird scarifications, strange modes of dress, bizarre rites of initiation, wild native dances, and savages prone at unpredictable intervals to fly into Dionysian frenzies in which they all run out and try to stick spears in one another. — You know the drill. — Here in keeping with the inexorable laws of motion pictures she falls immediately for a boy who doesn’t seem to know that she exists [obviously he was not studying the same camera angles I was], and, rendered witless by culture shock, succumbs to the influence of a strangely familiar triumverate of überbimbos, here known as The Plastics [Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amnda Seyfried]; engorged with the ensuing rush of popularity, she embarks upon The Hunt, explores a dark universe of Bad Diet, learns and perfects the Jingle Bell Rock, and arrives presently at the traditional Prom Night Crisis, whose resolution brings peace to a troubled land and reconciles one to another the warring tribes of the Dark Continent, and Lindsay with her Inner Nerd. —
Heathers Lite, in other words, rescued from banality only by the remarkable talents of Tina Fey [who might consider tearing herself away from television to write a few more movies] — and, of course, by the fact that Ms. Lohan, her well-publicized travails notwithstanding, is very, very cute.
Though admittedly she grows less cute by the minute; indeed, one now has the feeling that when she hurls upon the guy she is trying to impress, it isn't homage to Wayne and Garth. — It is, in fact, tempting to speculate about the possibility of a new version of
A Star Is Born: one in which the two protagonists eat magic Chinese fortune cookies and switch bodies, the younger descending into alcoholic disintegration, hounded by a dramatic chorus of paparazzi, while the elder climbs the ladder of success. — Best of all, though a writer's strike may loom, this thing will practically write itself.
____________Popping downers (6/5/07)
