Mean Girls (2024)

Jack and I both like musicals and this one is good fun with high production values. The enormous cast is led by Angourie Rice as the new girl in high school Cady and Reneé Rapp as Regina, the meanest girl of them all. Cady's friends are Auli'i Cravalho as Janis and Jaquel Spivey as Damian and Regina's posse is Bebe Wood as Gretchen who tries so hard and Avantika as the dim-witted Karen (that's her character's name, not her stereotype!). Some of the adults making appearances are Tina Fey, Tim Meadows, and Jon Hamm as teachers, Busy Philipps as Regina's mom, Jenna Fischer as Cady's mom, musician Megan Thee Stallion as herself, and Lindsay Lohan in a cameo as the Mathletes moderator.

It's co-directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. and written by Fey, based on her stage musical, based on her 2004 film, based on Rosalind Wiseman's 2002 book Queen Bees and Wannabes. We saw the touring company on stage in 2019.

Fey's husband Jeff Richmond composed the music for both the stage musical and this film one, but not the 2004 version. The soundtrack on Apple Music is all songs with lyrics, so I'm not streaming it as I write. We did, however, listen to it after we watched the movie weeks ago.

If you watch it now, look at Fischer's arms. She apparently broke her shoulder before shooting some scenes and couldn't move her right arm. Fey and Richmond's daughter Alice Richmond, now 19, made some of the art. 

Rice was last blogged for The Beguiled, Cravalho for the TV series Rise, Fey for acting in Soul, Hamm for Top Gun: Maverick, and Fischer for Brad's Status. 

I enjoyed Rapp's acting in all 20 episodes of The Sex Lives of College Girls. She's a singer/dancer in her own right, too, with albums and music videos. This is Spivey's feature debut after his Tony nomination for the lead in A Strange Loop on Broadway. Wood and Avantika have plenty of credits but are new to me. Meadows, best known for 182 episodes of Saturday Night Live in the 1990s, has been in a bunch of movies and hundreds of TV episodes. My favorites of Philipps' roles are 102 episodes of Cougar Town and 22 of Girls5eva. And if you didn't know, Lohan starred as Cady in the 2004 Mean Girls.

Jayne makes her feature directing debut and it's the second time around for her husband Perez. Fey's writing career is extensive and almost all TV except for the first Mean Girls. This is Richmond's second feature, after Baby Mama (2008), co-starring Fey, and he's written music for many of Fey's TV projects.

Rotten Tomatoes audiences are meaner than we are, averaging 62%, and its critics are only slightly nicer at 70.  We streamed the movie on Paramount+ on March 22, but it's now available on most streamers, including Prime and Apple TV.