![]() They are in turn ruled by the pouting queen of capricious blonde cruelty Regina, originally played by Rachel McAdams and now by Renée Rapp. ![]() Damian and Janis, outside the hetero-patriarchal power structure, are in an objective position to show wide-eyed Cady all the various in-crowds and power-bases, of which naturally the most fearsome are the terrifying “plastics”, the mean girls and Insta-princesses who rule the school. They are also the movie choric narrators, bringing us into the action as if it is a 112-minute TikTok in a smartphone-shaped screen. In the time-honoured manner, newbie Cady is taken in hand and guided through the high-school jungle by the all-knowing alienated cynical types great work here from Jaquel Spivey as Damian and Auli’i Cravalho as Janis. Fey reprises her role as maths teacher Ms Norbury, Jon Hamm plays an embarrassing sports-coach-slash-sexual-relations-counsellor – and there’s another iconic cameo. Moreover the Broadway Mean Girls was a big improvement on the film because the musical genre makes everything more amusingly histrionic – the “diva” theme made explicit – and this movie version succeeds in the same way, although like the subsequent movie iteration it sags in the over-extended third act.Īngourie Rice takes the role first played by Lindsay Lohan: she is sweet, unworldly teen Cady, once homeschooled by her academic mom in Kenya, and now relocated to the United States and having to fit in at high school where everyone is suspicious of this gawky (but beautiful) nerd. My own dissident reaction to the 2004 original was a mean review based on feeling it was inferior to Clueless, Election and 10 Things I Hate About You, and that it had its cake and ate it on the prettiness-fascism issue.īut I could have paid more attention to the showstopping individually funny lines screenwriter Tina Fey after all went on to create an authentic masterpiece with TV’s 30 Rock, in which she could more successfully represent in her own person the eternal Mean Girls themes of reconciling success with kindness. The high school comedy of status-sadism now reaches the same third life-cycle stage already achieved by Hairspray, The Producers and The Color Purple: the movie, the stage musical version and then the movie version of that.
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