20 Most Rewatchable Movies Of The 2000s
6. Mean Girls (2004)
The high school movie and the chick flick may both have changed substantially in the years since 2004, but one thing hasn't: Mean Girls is still the film to beat in either genre.
Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) joins North Shore High near Chicago after years of home-schooling in Africa, and suffice to say it’s a culture shock. She gets a trial-by-fire initiation into the ways of US teenage life, and, despite making friends with the outcasts, winds up inadvertently joining the Plastics, the school’s trio of pink-clad popular girls: Regina George (Rachel McAdams), Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert), and Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried). In a fight for the affections of Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett), Cady embarks on a campaign of guerrilla warfare against Regina, ruining her figure, alienating her friends, and exposing her true face to the whole school.
Mean Girls was a staple for teenage girls and boys alike in the noughties, with Tina Fey's writing elevating it far above its sloppy, mawkish contemporaries and ensuring enough quotes, laughs, spats, and higher-level commentary to suit viewers of all ages. On the surface, it conforms to every cliché in the book, but look past the blonde hair and pink tees, and there’s expert satire, pulling every trope apart at the seams and dissecting the high school experience one internal monologue at a time.
After all these years, putting Mean Girls on is still so fetch.