Mean Girls (2004)

Not counting The Parent Trap (1998), which I’ve seen on television in bits and pieces, I had never watched a Lindsay Lohan film until now. So my image of her was that she was the typical child star who couldn’t deal with not really having a normal childhood and “broke bad” (see also: Macaulay Culkin, Britney Spears, Shia LaBeouf, Justin Bieber). While that hasn’t really changed, I do now also kinda see why the media seemed so much more interested in Lohan’s exploits than those of her contemporaries: she was actually talented.

Mean Girls was made right between the time when Lohan was too young for audiences to really tell whether she was a good actress and when she went off the rails. It’s a comedy, not a drama, but it still required someone in the lead role who had screen presence and who could convincingly portray the main character’s journey. Lohan fulfills both criteria at least as well as Emma Stone (I get the comparison now!). One wonders what her career would look like today, ten years later, if she’d stayed (moderately) clean.