BOO, YOU WHORE!: A review of Mean Girls. Spoilers and possible TMI follow.

The short version is, this is diet no-carbs Cruel Intentions, and although I laughed a lot during the movie, I ended up hating it, I mean really disliking it a lot. Whereas despite my problems with the ending of CI, I basically did OM NOM NOM that movie and all its pomps and all its works.

The longer version: This movie is kind of based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman. And Wiseman is a DC native, who… hey, taught me self-defense (or attempted to–you’d think “eyes, knees, groin, throat” is easy, but you’d be really, really wrong) and ran a workshop at my high school which is the first (and, until now, only) place I’d talked about being felt up in the darkroom. (I should note that this was after I helped to found the gay/straight alliance at my school, so a) LOL WHUT?? and b) even someone who was kind of a harpy of political correctness really didn’t feel okay talking about that incident, which was ultimately silly and minor and had, literally, no effect on my school participation, because I was addicted to photography. So you know, if you’re like Katie Roiphe and think the rape statistics must be wrong because nobody you know had that happen to her… maybe you’re not the person they tell.)

Anyway, my point is that Wiseman is awesome, and although I haven’t read her book yet, this review of Mean Girls should in no way be read as a slam on Wiseman’s book. I respect her a lot.

Whose story?: There are some really funny quips about race (“I only date girls of color”; “I’m from Michigan”) and gay stuff. I love that they named the dykey girl “Janis Ian”… although, you get three guesses whether she’s really gay or not. The first two don’t count.

But you know whose story this isn’t, ever?

The gay kid. (Check out the prom scene with Janis Ian and her dance if you don’t believe me.) The “hostile black hotties” (or “standoffish black hotties”–I can’t remember–the black girls who all sat together in the cafeteria). The “cool Asians.”

The fat girls.

Yeah, I mean, the demi-demi-dykey, less-awesome Winona Ryder/Ally Sheedy girl reacts like she’s been accused of eating babies every time someone even begins to suggest that she might be gay.

This is the story of a girl played by Lindsay Lohan, who has a crush on a guy played by …a nice white guy I haven’t heard of. And that’s great, cute white rich straight girls are people too and all that, but… one does get tired of this story. I understand that this kind of Little-Red-turned-wolf story requires a fairly boring character at its center, since she has to be naive and malleable at the start in order to learn her life lesson by the end. But I don’t think that excuses the movie from being so desperately predictable in its casting, nor from treating the less cute-white-rich-straight-girls mostly as set dressing. (I think Kevin G, not the gay friend–despite some of his awesome lines–is the exception, since I can’t think of an occasion where Kevin gets shoved out of the way so the focus can remain on a more “mainstream” character.) Nor from letting the Lohan character act as self-esteem fairy at the end, princessing that even the fat girl and the wheelchair girl look beautiful tonight, while they beam in needy adoration.

I’m pretty sure this movie thinks it’s progressive. Which brings us to our next point.

Whose fault?: So there’s totally a scene where the (male) principal and Tina Fey’s character hold a consciousness-raising session in the gym, girls only.

What do the boys get? Is high school girls’ cruelty–so often centered around dating, “slut” labeling, sexual posturing and sexual fear–solely the girls’ issue? I think you might want to talk to the boys in front of whom the girls are posing. And that would still be true even though the movie never touches on the real hard stuff, like date rape.

Now I get why Veronica Mars was supposed to be so groundbreaking….

Girl trouble: There are a lot of fun throwaway moments in this movie–Regina’s little sister as an ass-shaking zombie; “That’s why her hair is so big! It’s full of secrets!” (the movie really is funny)–and you know, I love Amanda “Lilly Kane” Seyfried in anything. And there are right-on cultural criticism moments, like the Playboy Halloween outfits and the “cool mom” shtik. (The moviemakers might not realize that the first five minutes of the flick don’t actually make it not an advertisement for homeschooling.)

But yeah: I felt like this was the saccharine version, which made excuses for the real racial, class, and sexual hierarchies it pretended to decry. I hated this a lot, and it made me appreciate the awesomeness of Cruel Intentions even more than I already did.