Making Fetch Happen: 'Mean Girls' 10 Years Later

Startling to think that ten years ago Lindsay Lohan was the still a promising redhead on the verge of breaking out, Tina Fey was still mostly unknown outside of Saturday Night Live, Rachel McAdams hadn't yet made three (3!) time travel romantic fairy tales and Mean Girls was just starting to enter the pop cultural lexicon.  Ten years later, times have changed, and the three main ingredients that made this particularly sassy and smart teen comedy pop the magical way that it did have each branched out into completely different directions but the movie is still just as smart and fun and sassy as ever.  As Heathers was in the 1980s and Clueless in the 1990s, Mean Girls is the ultimate defining teen comedy of the 2000s.  Mean Girls borrows heavily from Heathers, but still manages to be its distinctive own beast and its exploration of high school hierarchy is still bracing, super quotable and majestically funny.  It's hard to believe its been ten years since we were first introduced to Cady Heron, Regina George, Ms. Norbury, Janis Ian, Damian, Gretchen Weiners, Karen Smith, Aaron Samuels, Shane Oman and the odd lots of Cool Asians, Nerdy Asians and Mathletes.

Map of North Shore High: Where do you fit in?

Happy Birthday to "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"

March 19, 2004-- One of the greatest movies ever made opens in theaters.  Directed by Michel Gondry, written by Charlie Kaufman and starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind marks a sublime snapshot of everyone involved was at the top of their game.

It's greatness isn't up for debate as far as I'm concerned.  It's personal, beautiful, anguishing, haunting, funny, sad, hopeful, romantic, weird and well, eternal.  To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (how did that happen so fast?), the least one can do is give it a revisit.  For a film I'm rather hopelessly possessive and obsessed with, forgive me for making it all about me, but the best thing I can say about this modern masterpiece (a word I don't use lightly, in fact, one I try to seldom use at all) is that it feels so much like a film that was made just for me, the personal component is important.  Particularly when the film itself is sculpted, twisted and pretzel-curved out of such relatable pain.  Yet through the miracle of an ingenious screenplay, playful direction, top-tier actors and crafty artisans, the film is never depressing-- it sings, it soars, it inspires.

I remember seeing the film in theaters on opening day, it was a matinee.  It was showing at the kind of grungy-looking strip mall theater near where I used to live.  Not my ideal spot, but relatively inexpensive.  I had wished it opened, instead, at the nicer, far more comfortable multiplex across the street, but for cinema, sacrifices are made.  To this day, I'm surprised the film opened wide-- for such a nutty, hard to suss-up mind bend, that takes some real balls on the part of Focus Features, who distributed-- I doubt that would happen had the movie opened this year.  Anyhow, the first viewing (there have at least fifteen more since than, and that's probably being conservative), I don't remember being instantly in love with the film.  There was certainly a crush, but I was fuzzy, nearly instantly unsure of what I had just seen.  Yet with time, my method of discerning if a film is truly great, Eternal Sunshine (unlike a few of its protagonists) stayed, kept refreshing and churning inside my brain.  I hope it stays there forever.

BEST SHOT

The Film Experience is celebrating by collecting the best shots of this beautiful movie.  Which is actually really hard.  For a film so feeds the mind and heart so fully, it's sometimes hard to remember what an absolute beaut of film it truly is, ever more so because the very best (and most instantly iconic) beats of the film are in such constant motion.  My pick is a simple one of Clementine Kruczynski's huffing out the door.  Winslet, giving one of the best performances ever, pounces and acts the hell out of her; my pick needed to Clementine-centric.  I have more to say on Eternal Sunshine-- the 10th Anniversary will live on for the next couple of days.