Chelsea weaver girls gone wild2/16/2024 Not bad for a movie adapted from a self-help book (Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes) for the stressed-out parents of toxic teenagers.īack in 2004, Mean Girls’ villains, the vicious Plastics (led by McAdams’s Regina George), scrawled their opinions on their classmates (fat, ugly, sleeping with a teacher, you get the gist) in a neon pink “Burn Book” whose pages eventually get thrown around the school, sparking inter-girl warfare. Now, the Broadway version of the film has been adapted for the big screen (and is in cinemas now). Mean Girls was gleefully un-PC, and despite reports that Gen Z are more interested in activism and wellness than drinking, partying or having sex, it’s held up remarkably well. How it was perfectly fine to spend hours ripping apart your best friends behind their back – but if an outsider dared to… attack! Maths was tragically uncool and trying at anything academic was always to be kept secret the dumber you acted in front of boys, the better. There were maxims featured in Mean Girls that stuck with us: never, ever fancy a friend’s ex-boyfriend (until you did, in which case prepare for catfights and snide Facebook posts). Quotes from the film became part of our daily vocabulary fancy dress indeed meant shunning fabric (writing this, a horrific flashback came to me of when I wore a velvet unitard, with PVC cat ears and collar, to my secondary school’s leavers day – sorry Mr Fallon) but the biggest crossover was our ruthless desire to be raging, hormonal b-ches. There was underage drinking, sex, pervy teachers and wearing lingerie as outerwear on Halloween, set against a number of artificial social codes (“On Wednesdays we wear pink!”) that divided students into suitable cliques. Tina Fey’s smash-hit social satire Mean Girls arrived at just the right time, making stars of its cast (Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried) who turned the ultra-specific confines of an American high school into a microcosm of the millennium. Bland indie-rock was ubiquitous, clothes meant cut-off camo trousers and miniscule denim mini skirts, and sexism was more pervasive than ever: cast your mind back to the corner shop shelves filled with lads mags or celebrity glossies, their pages filled with a combination of naked women or hit pieces aimed at actresses who didn’t fit into a Size Zero. The early Noughties was hardly a high point in youth culture.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |