Mean Girls (2004)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO HIGH-SCHOOL STUDENT DESPOTS.)

[Now for a bust of a breakthrough movie for a couple of stars whose careers have since seen wildly divergent fortunes.]

Mean Girls (2004) is an American teen comedy film, directed by Mark Waters, starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams. The screenplay was written by Tina Fey, who also co-stars.

In the end, high-school queen-bee contender, Lindsay Lohan decides there is more to school life than teen machinations (maybe.)

Recently repatriated to the States after a sheltered upbringing in remote Africa, intelligent but socially naive sixteen year old Lohan is thrown into the deep-end of American teenage life when she attends school for the first time.

Totally unprepared for both the demands of education and teenage (mostly female) social cliques, she is offered a lifeline by a pair of student outcasts, in the form of a map that lays bare the prevailing high school pecking order.

As a result of suffering the unwanted innuendo laden attentions of the boyfriend of its leader, Rachel McAdams, Lohan finds herself unexpectedly welcomed into the circle of girls at the pinnacle of the hierarchy.

Sensing an opportunity for revenge against their principle tormentors, Lohan's outcast friends persuade her to sabotage McAdams's group from within, but in the process Lohan becomes just as superficial and venal as the girls themselves.

However, realizing Lohan's treacherous betrayal, McAdams uses the Hoover-esque dossier she has compiled to frame Lohan as the source of all rumour and scandal against everyone at the school, leading to a complete breakdown in order.

Authority is only restored during an assembly when the plot against the universally derided McAdams is confessed by the students, after which a fleeing and distraught McAdams is run down and almost killed by a school bus.

Atoning for the responsibility she feels, the guilt-ridden Lohan gradually manages to recover her sweet personality and shake off her pariah status.

And after triumphing in an inter-school math competition, is sufficiently rehabilitated to be elected end-of-year dance queen, clearing the way for a new intake of wannabe queen-bees, who she fantasizes will also be hit by a bus.

Much of the comic enjoyment on offer here is, perhaps, more easily appreciated by those, like writer Tina Fey herself, with some age perspective on proceedings. For those still ducking the psychological crossfire raking eleventh grade trenches, Mean Girls can read very much more like its self-help survival guide inspiration. Nevertheless, even if the eventual message is a bit pat, there is more than enough sweet badinage to help the teenage medicine go down.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Girls

This Is Where I Leave You (2014)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHETHER ONLY THOSE IN MID-LIFE SUFFER MID-LIFE CRISES?)

[After reading this bust, you may be wondering how such a star-packed piece could turn out the way it does? Let's face it, they should all have known better. The fact the the screenplay was written by the author of the book on which the movie is based, may prove to be significant. Consider this a warning.]

This Is Where I Leave You (2014) is an American comedy-drama film directed by Shawn Levy, starring Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne, Corey Stoll, Kathryn Hahn, Connie Britton, Timothy Olyphant, Dax Shepard, and Jane Fonda.

In the end, separated 40-something, unemployed radio producer, father-to-be, Jason Bateman is talked into abandoning his even-keeled life, to date, and into joining in with the mid-life crises being experienced by his friends and family.

Coerced, along with his two brothers and sister, by their mother, Jane Fonda, into a traditional seven day period of contemplative mourning for their deceased father, confined within the family home, Bateman initially attempts to conceal the recent breakup of his marriage and loss of job, after catching his boorish, blank-shooting, shock-jock boss, Dax Shepard, in bed with his wife, excusing her absence from the wake on concocted health grounds.

Under constant needling from his sister, Tina Fey, whose own marriage has hit the buffers due to the regret she feels for abandoning her true love, Timothy Olyphant, the son of a family friend and neighbour, after he sustained a brain injury as the result of a past car accident that Fey was involved in, Bateman reveals all.

His separation is thrown into doubt, however, when his wife shows up unexpectedly, with the news that she is pregnant by him, prompting wife of his older brother and ex-girlfriend, Kathryn Hahn, to throw herself at Bateman in the hope that he, too, can get her pregnant, something his brother, Corey Stoll, has so far failed to do, despite Hahn enduring prolonged fertility treatments.

Persuaded by Fey that the way to get over his wife's infidelity, so that they can get back together, is for Bateman to be briefly unfaithful with local girl Rose Byrne, who he keeps running into and who still has a crush on him, no sooner has Bateman done the deed, than he has to rush to his wife's side, after she develops a complication with the pregnancy.

Despite realising, after Shepard shows up at his wife's hospital bed with the sole intention of handing her back to him, that he is going to have to have some sort of relationship with his wife, for the sake of their baby, Bateman nevertheless wants his romance with Byrne to be more than a one-time thing.

Suddenly overcome with jealously and frustration on discovering his, still not pregnant wife being consoled by Bateman, Stoll chases his brother out of the house and proceeds to pummel him, in front of a growing crowd of onlookers, until Fonda distracts everyone's attention by engaging in a prolonged lesbian kiss with their neighbour, Olyphant's mother, her secret lover.

In the aftermath of their mother's stunning revelation, Bateman resolves the brothers' long-standing dispute over the future of their father's sporting goods store, by persuading Stoll to take on their younger brother, recovered addict and reformed drug grower, Adam Driver, whose wayward promiscuity has just lost him the financial safety net he had found in older woman, Connie Britton, his therapist.

With his sister resigned to rejoining her husband, despite her continuing feelings for Olyphant, after assuring Byrne that he intends to continue their fledgling relationship, once he has sorted out the mess of his own, Bateman steals Driver's two-seater sports car, left to him by Britton, and heads north to Maine, an emblematic destination he had often contemplated, but never before had the nerve to seek.


Oy vey, this family likes to talk! The whole movie is basically exposition, peppered with one-liners, of decidedly variable quality, mostly referring to Fonda's recent extreme breast enhancement, her embarrassing candour over her married sex-life, and their evangelical rabbi's erection-related childhood nickname.

I never got a good enough look at the deceased to be sure of the gene pool the siblings issued from. But it wouldn't have surprised me if the father had turned out to be Larry David. They talk, and talk, and talk, and talk. And then they all talk some more.

They talked so much, in fact, that by the time Bateman got to deliver his climactic speech, the part of my brain that processes language had switched off. Very fortunately, the person he was delivering the speech to, thought it so good, that she handily summarised it, immediately after he stopped talking, for me and all the other people in the audience, who had similarly tuned out. Phew! And then he started talking, again. Argh!

Unless your idea of a good time is attending a Therapy Addicts Anonymous meeting, this is where you should probably leave this movie.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Where_I_Leave_You