A Mom's Review of Mean Girls - Ten Years Later

I distinctly remember the first time I watched Mean Girls. I was in my last trimester of pregnancy (with a little girl) and spent most of my time watching movies. Mean Girls resonated with me for a variety of reasons, but the most important reason was that I had lived this movie. I mean what grown woman hasn’t gone to school with a group of girls just like the main characters in the movie. I won’t tell you what my role in school was, but I will tell you if I knew now what I didn’t know then, I would have handled high school much differently. The other reasons that the movie Mean Girls is a movie I will never forget include the facts that it was:

• Written and starred in by Tina Fey
• It was the last movie where Lindsay Lohan was relevant
• I had lived this life

Means Girls is Turning 10 Years Old

Almost immediately after the movie debuted, it began to have a cult following. Ten years later, this cult following is bigger than anyone could have imagined, and these fans are super psyched that the movie was turning ten years old in 2014. The only thing that makes the 10th anniversary of this film even sweeter is the fact that April 30, 2014, will happen on a Wednesday. As anyone who knows anything about the movie will tell you, the Plastics wear pink on Wednesdays, so there will surely be high school and college girls running around in pink quoting the film on this historic day for Mean Girl fans.

A Reflection on the Movie Ten Years Later

When I watched the movie for the first time, I was 24-years-old and not quite a mother yet. At this time, the movie resonated with me because high school was still so clear in my mind, and this is precisely how high school girls acted…mean, even to their best friends. Ten years later, I am the mother of a tween girl, and now I realize there are still mean girls everywhere. My daughter deals with it, and I still deal with it from time to time. Instead, of wishing there were no mean girls in the world, I now know what matters most is how you handle mean girls. Like Cady (Lindsay Lohan) in the movie, sometimes, you have to play both sides of the field to decide who you are and whether you can live with the decisions you make.

No matter what you take from the movie, you will certainly enjoy the all-star cast that Mark Waters put together in this cult classic. If you think many of the actors and actresses look familiar, it’s because a large part of the cast has Saturday Night Live roots. In addition to Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Tim Meadows, and Ana Gasteyer starred in the film. If Mean Girls is your favorite teenage girl movie, make sure to tell me about it in the comments below. If another teenage movie is your favorite, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below too.

• The screenplay for Mean Girls was based on a book “Queen Bees and Wannabes” by Rosalind Wiseman
• Released in theaters on April 30, 3004
• Tina Fey starred and wrote the screenplay for the movie
• Rated PG-13
• A teen comedy film
• Shines a light on teen girl cliques and the damaging effects they can have on teenagers
• Film was shot mostly in Toronto, Canada
• Ironically, Lindsay Lohan first read for Regina George, but worried the mean girl role would hurt her reputation
• Mean Girls 2 does not continue the original story and does not feature the same cast with the exception of Tim Meadows