Mean Girls

Director: Mark S. Waters
Year Released: 2004
Rating: 2.0

Like a parfait with too many toppings, you have to really dig through this pandering teen picture - openly inspired by both Heathers and Clueless - to get to the important stuff (the ice cream): problems with racism and homophobia in high school, teachers needing to take on debasing second (and third!) jobs to supplement income and mothers who simply refuse to grow old gracefully. It devolves (literally and figuratively) in the last act, where the school undergoes some kind of Proletariat revolt, and the girls of 'lesser beauty' fight back against the visually gifted, thereby leading to the dissolution of class division and the final Utopian state of everyone accepting mingling with and accepting each other (like Communism, too, new dissenters - literally freshman simulacra of Lindsay Lohan and company - are bound to be dealt with). Otherwise, there's your typical assortment of teen movie ingredients: Lohan has a crush on the most popular boy in school (who used to date the most popular girl in school!), there's a big dance, there's a house party, there are big speeches and there's a gym teacher with Asian Fever.