After his edgy independent debut, The House of Yes, director Mark S. Waters crapped out a pair of glossy Hollywood "hits" in Head Over Heels and Freaky Friday.  With his latest – Mean Girls – Waters shows he didn't actually sell his soul to the devil for a lucrative career making tired vanity projects for people who don't deserve them.  The film is clever, witty and biting enough to make you wonder how it got by with a PG-13 rating.  Then again, these positive aspects of Girls have much more to do with the material than Waters' direction.  But at least it's a step away from the dark side of filmmaking.

Girls was written by Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey, who adapted the story from Rosalind Wiseman's New York Times non-fiction article-turned-book about the hierarchy of the teenage universe, with a concentration on how bitchy girls can be (what a revelation!).  Friday alum Lindsay Lohan plays Cady Heron, a 16-year-old who, until Girls' credits start to roll, was raised and home-schooled by her Wild Thornberry-type family in Africa.  When the 'rents finally decide to settle down in a wealthy Chicago suburb, Cady has to attend a real school for the first time, a task as daunting as you might imagine (my cousin experienced the same thing after spending his formative educational years in a tiny land mass in the Virgin Islands).

Initially, Cady befriends the school's prerequisite Lesbo Goth Chick (Lizzy Caplan) and Overweight Snarky Homosexual (Daniel Franzese), who teach her the ins and outs of cliques.  When Cady is given the opportunity to join The Plastics – a triptych of shallow, fashion-obsessed model-types – she decides to infiltrate their ranks, reporting back to LGC and OSH so they can devise means to destroy not only The Plastics, but the entire way of high school life as they, you, or I know it (my cousin, to the best of my knowledge, tried nothing like this when he finally got to a school that had more than one room).

The hijinks that follow will be shocking to anyone who thinks they're going to see Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen II.  They might actually be a little shocking even if you're used to Fey's wickedly dark sense of humor on SNL, and that's because most films about high school life – especially those starring the latest Tween pop sensation – tend to shy away from portraying high school life as anything but completely unrealistic.  Not Girls, though. If it didn't cop out with a sappy-crappy ending, people might be talking about it as if it were Heathers or Election.  Instead, it's a 10 Things I Hate About You at best.  Not bad company, but it could have been so much better if Cady blew up the school or accidentally poisoned one of the Plastics.

I haven't seen Lohan in a film since her dual performance in The Parent Trap and was pretty surprised at how decent she was in Girls (I was expecting more of a Hilary Duff turn).  The Plastics are sufficiently hot (The Hot Chick's Rachel McAdams), slutty (Party of Five's Lacey Chabert) and brain dead (Amanda Seyfried).  Fey, however, is slightly more plastic that you might expect, following the sad path of a devilishly funny comedian on their best behavior so they won't ruin their aspiring film career.  And, please, don't be scared by the number of former/current SNL members in attendance (Fey, Tim Meadows, Ana Gasteyer, Amy Poehler).

Waters does well with a goldmine of a script and is at his best when Girls offers slo-mo shots that compare the actions of typical high school students to that of jungle animals, for Cady's jungle-knowledge benefit.  Here's to hoping he sticks to less conventional material in the future. 

1:33 -

for sexual content, language and some teen partying