Mean Girls (2004)

“I know she's kind of socially retarded and weird, but she's my friend... so, just promise me you won't make fun of her!”
- Regina George (Rachel McAdams), Mean Girls (2004)

Unlike most other movies in its genre, Mean Girls isn’t about some faux-ugly teenage girl who, with the help of a hardened jock who falls inexplicably in love with her once he gets bored of dating the cheerleaders, suddenly becomes beautiful, radiant and beloved, all the while simultaneously and paradoxically proving that it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Instead, Mean Girls is a tongue-in-cheek comedy-drama about a 16 year-old girl called Cady (Lindsay Lohan), the child of two travelling academics, who is about to go to an American public high school for the first time.

There, clueless, plaid-wearing Cady is befriended by the indie kids, Janis and Damien (Lizzie Caplan and Daniel Franzese), who explain to her how the pecking order at North Shore High works. However, since she is a “regulation hotty,” Cady soon attracts the notice of North Shore’s manipulative Queen Bee, Regina George (played superbly by Rachel McAdams.) Spurred on by her indie friends, who want Cady to gather information on “the Plastics,” so they can laugh together later about the popular girls inane lifestyle, Cady reluctantly begins to eat lunch with at Regina’s table, hang-out with them and, bit by bit, she becomes sucked into the intoxicating, gossip-riddled world of the teen it-crowd – including falling for Regina’s ex-boyfriend, school sexpot Aaron Samuels, (Jonathan Bennett) and stirring up trouble between Regina and her brilliantly played sidekicks - “totally rich” Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert) and “the dumbest girl you will ever meet,” Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried.)

Now, I absolutely love Mean Girls – unsurprising, I know. Yes, I hate the ending, but then, who doesn’t? But long before Tina Fey was famous for her side-splittingly hilarious impersonations of Vice-Presidential contender, Sarah Palin, on Saturday Night Live ,she was critically acclaimed for writing this funny, bitchy exposé of high school cliques and popularity contests. (She also plays the schools Maths teacher, Miss Norbury.) Sadly and probably quite dysfunctionally, Mean Girls makes me miss school and the glory days of secret house parties, sexuality panics, dress code fears, crash dieting, needlessly overcomplicated scheming and the endless deliciousness of being slightly ridiculous on a daily basis – oh... to be 17 again. Also, another very good movie. (See what I did there?)

Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud

"It seemed to me that each one coveted what the other possessed. Joan envied Bette's incredible talent, and Bette envied Joan's seductive glamour."
- George Cukor, Hollywood director

I have just finished reading a fantastically entertaining book about old Hollywood, called Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud, by journalist Shaun Considine. The book, which I bought last week, was first published in 1989 and it has been in print ever since. It chronicles the forty year-long feud between two of the greatest stars Hollywood ever produced - Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Considine, a respected New York journalist, first became intrigued at the idea of doing a joint biography of the two women when he interviewed Bette Davis in April 1973. Somehow hearing that he had spoken to Davis about the only movie they had ever done together - the psychological thriller Whatever happened to Baby Jane?, Joan Crawford called Considine at home to give him her version of her relationship with "Miss Davis." Over the next sixteen years, whilst working on other projects, Considine interviewed hundreds of people who knew the two women and what is so brilliant about the book is that he often quotes disagreeing sources one after another. Unlike the sexually-explicit David Bret biography Joan Crawford: Hollywood Martyr or the viciously critical Bette Davis by Barbara Leaming, Shaun Considine's book isn't trying to push any one thesis or version of the actresses' lives, he's just trying to give us all the information and let the people involved tell it in their own words. It's like a cross between celebrity magazine, a newsreel and a history book. So I, naturally, loved it.

To fill people in on the general story, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were considered the Queens of Hollywood's Golden Age in the 1930s and 1940s. Both commanded enormous salaries and lived a life of unprecedented luxury and glamour. With the rise of television in the late 1950s, they struggled, before both re-inventing themselves as Queens of expensive Horror and psychological thrillers in the 1960s. They were both (allegedly) born in the same year - 1908; they both won at least one Oscar; they were both married multiple times; they both adopted children; both struggled with alcoholism in their later years; both spoke their mind and both were not afraid of fighting back against the often cruel and vicious male studio bosses who controlled the lives and careers of everyone in the Hollywood at the time. And they both hated each other. "I have never been anywhere, all over the world," said Davis (above right), "where they haven't asked about Joan and me. I don't mind it. I find it interesting. But I have always wondered. What do people think they see in us together? After all, we had nothing in common."

Over the course of her six decade career, Bette Davis appeared in 121 movies, beginning with her performance in The Bad Sister in 1931 and finally ending with Wicked Stepmother in 1989. She won the Oscar for Best Actress twice - firstly for her role as an adulterous actress in Dangerous (1935) and then as a scheming Southern belle in Jezebel (1938.) She was nominated eight more times – for her performances in Dark Victory (1939), The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), Now, Voyager (1942), Mr. Skeffington (1944), All About Eve (1950), The Star (1952) and Whatever happened to Baby Jane? (1962.) But lost to Ginger Rogers, Joan Fontaine, Greer Garson, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Holliday, Shirley Booth and Anne Bancroft, respectively. Her performances as Elizabeth I in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) and The Virgin Queen (1955) and as the Empress Carlotta of Mexico in Juarez (1939) were also highly critically-acclaimed, by both critics and historians.

Hugging

Recently I got to thinking (yay!) about hugging and it was actually the events of last week which made me really think about. Hugging, in general, is considered by many British people to be just a bit too "American" - whatever that means. The culture of hugging one another to say hello or goodbye is definitely not a traditional British way of doing things. It isn't always easy to ask "how do you do?" when your arms are clasped behind somebody else's back and I have a sort of schizoid love/hate relationship with the hug - I feel like it's something I should do more, I like the people I do hug, but I also have relationships in my life in which hugging would just seem bizarre, if not downright frightening.

As some of you may know, on Tuesday March 16th my uncle, Richard, passed away very unexpectedly. During Uncle Richard's Wake, the entire extended family got together most afternoons and every evening to meet visitors who had come to pay their condolences, keep an open house and keep the endless supply of never-ending tea, sandwiches and cakes without which, apparently, the entire Northern Irish Protestant culture of mourning would collapse in on itself.

Two days after Uncle Richard passed away, my cousins Jonathan and Andrew called down to see our grandparents. (They, like me, were Richard's nephews.) As Jonathan was saying goodbye to our grandfather, he hugged him and it suddenly occurred to me that Grandpa Richard and I had grown out of the habit of hugging one another once I'd turned about 15 and concluded that it wasn't "manly" or something equally foolish. Grandpa and I are very close, so there's really no good reason apart from habit for not giving him a goodbye hug. I would never leave their house without hugging Nana and giving her a kiss, but for the last eight years I can't remember really hugging my grandfather. With the sadness of Uncle Richard's death I decided to make the effort again to make sure I hugged Grandpa every time I left the house and that really has been a good thing. Undoubtedly, a lot of other family members were spurred on to be more affectionate with one another in the wake of Uncle Richard's passing - my Uncle Ivan, my cousin's husband Martin, my cousins Elaine and June and my sister Jenny were all making a real effort to make sure they hugged everyone before they left the house each night. Exceptional circumstances, no doubt, but lovely all the same.

As I was writing this I also began to think about hugging in general and it struck me that I actually hug astonishingly few of my friends. Am I dead on the inside? There are obviously some very good friends that I do hug on a regular basis, but I have never hugged the vast majority of my close personal friends. There are friends like Emerald, Alexa and Scarlett, all of whom I would usually greet with a kiss, but the only time I've ever hugged a really good friend like, say, Aisleagh, was probably when we both mutually mistook each other for another bottle of gin! And if I went to hug either Beth, Laura or Ellen, they would undoubtedly assume I was trying to choke them in some particularly new and avant-garde manner, with the end result being that Beth would make her panicked pterodactyl sound, Ellen would suffer an enormous panic attack and quite possibly a stroke and Laura would scratch a bloody vengeance into my face.

The greatest example of the anti-hugging phenomenon is undoubtedly my friend Kerry. Kerry is one of my best friends, we've been friends since the age of eleven, we have cried together, laughed together, binged together, we can finish each other's sentences and we pushed each other into self-destructive cycles of delightfulness for the last twelve years and yet not once have we ever hugged each other. When our friend Sarah attempted to mock our "frigid" ways and introduced hugging into the group, the only real result was a wave of paranoia, with me checking my back every five minutes to see if they'd stuck a note onto the back of it or a gleam of suspicious fear glinting permanently in Kerry's eyes.

But, so what? Kerry and I are not any the less close friends - dysfunctionally close, actually - because we don't hug. Neither are Sarah and I. Does it all boil down to the quite sad fact that we don't trust each other enough to hug without an attempt at sabotage? Of course it does! And that's a glorious thing. Have I been lacking in familial closeness with my grandfather for the last eight years? No, I don't think so. I love him, he loves me and that's really all that matters. The friends I do hug - great; the friends I don't - delightful.

Hugging, in the end, is a bit like drinking. There's nothing more delightful when it's the right time and nothing more sickening when you're just not in the mood, time or place for it.

In the beginning...

After several months of fearing that my technophobia meant that any attempt at blogging would end in a total and complete disaster (not dissimilar in size and scope to the "Golden Girls" spin-off), I have finally been persuaded to overcome said fears after being inspired by the excellent examples of Tea at Trianon and Louise in Lovelyland. So, I've decided to grab the metaphorical bull by the horns and here goes!

There isn't really a plan or mission statement for the blog, which could, of course, mean that things will become chaotic, but that's half the fun. I plan to keep the ranting down to a bare minimum (beyond what is obviously unavoidable) and discuss the things I'm interested in - favourite movies, books I'm reading, funny anecdotes and, of course, history.

I also hope to avoid starting too many observations with the phrase "So I got to thinking...", but I can't promise too much...