The latest Honest Trailer takes on the classic early 2000s comedy written by Tina Fey, Mean Girls, calling it the best thing to come out of that era. Released in 2004, when Fey was still working at Saturday Night Live, the movie was a very loose adaptation of Rosalind Wiseman's non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes, which was an expose of how cliques in high school can affect the self-esteem of teenage girls. Mark Waters, who had directed Freaky Friday the year before, helmed from Fey's script. It was a huge success, spawning a made-for-TV sequel and a Broadway musical.
Lindsay Lohan starred as Cady Heron, a high school student who moves back to Illinois after spending 12 years in Africa, where she was home-schooled by her well-meaning parents. At the school, she meets "The Plastics," a group of popular girls led by Regina George (Rachel McAdams) whose followers include Gretchen Weiners (Lacey Chabert) and Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried). Cady also befriends a Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian Leigh (Daniel Franzese), a pair of social outcasts at the school. The plot revolves around Cady's transformation from a quiet new girl into one of the leaders of the Plastics, betraying her friends along the way.
Now, Screen Junkies' latest Honest Trailer takes on Mean Girls, dishing out criticism and praise in equal measure. The video points out the fact that Mean Girls isn't just a cautionary tale but, if looked at from a different perspective, is essentially an instruction manual for future sociopaths, thanks to the behavior depicted. It also criticizes the fact that the plot doesn't change anything about the toxic culture presented, choosing instead to shuffle everyone in the cliques around. You can see the Honest Trailer below.
But the video also praises the movie for its cast, most of whom went on to become big-name movie stars, as well as for the fact that it's a reasonably accurate representation of high school in the early 2000s. It also says Mean Girls is probably the most enduring piece of popular culture to emerge from the era, although in the age of social media and live streaming it's incredibly dated. Surely the rumored movie version of the musical will remedy once it hit screens.
Despite looking dated now, especially with all the girls writing their mean comments in a "burn book" instead of online, Mean Girls remains entertaining, funny, and, most importantly, accurate. The existence of social media only amplifies the mean high school culture that the film exposes, creating self-esteem problems in children on high school campuses around the country. That relevance almost two decades later proves that Mean Girls is deserving of its classic status.
Source: Screen Junkies