M-FOR-MOVIES!!

A Sweet-souled, down-to-earth daughter of zoologists, 15-year-old Cady (Lohan, reigning queen of the tweenies) goes from a lifetime of home tutoring in ‘the African bush’ to a sprawling high school in suburban Chicago. Once there, she immediately grasps that the pitiless laws of the jungle apply equally to the various sharp-toothed species of American teendom. A scowly artiste (Caplan) and a zinger-zapping gay guy (Franzese) adopt comely Cady as one of their own and, just for laughs, set her on an under-cover mission to infiltrate the ‘Plastics’, a consortium of high priestesses led by terrifying alpha girl Regina (McAdams). The deft, precisely detailed script by Saturday Night live star Tina Fey (also cast as the voice-of-reason maths teacher) dramatizes Rosalind Wiseman’s bestseller Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other realties of Adolescence. Happily, Fey and Waters – who also directed Lohan in Freaky Friday – gently, tweak the studios’ usual high-gloss caricature of adolescence and aim for acutely hilarious and surprisingly empathic sociology. The movie nails the servile malice of 15-year-old girls, the voodoo art of sparkly-eyed mind-fuck (blindsiding case study: Regina tells Cady she’s pretty, Cady bashfully thanks her, Regina fires back, ‘So you think you’re pretty?’), and, of course, the lunch-table caste system. Emeritus losers will wince with recognition when Cady takes her tray into bathroom stall rather than face the infernal maw also known as the school cafeteria.

ClouCloud nine tosh from the days when Warner movies preached that delinquents were just good kids in need of a helping hand .Cagney play a ward-heeler rewarded with a political sinecure as deputy commissioner of a reform school. Up from the slums himself, horrified by the sadistic brutality of the director (Digges),Cagney takes over. Improving the food relaxing the discipline, and replacing the warders with a system of self-government, he soon has the boy’s easting out of his hands. But unrest back in the ward ends with Cagney shooting the trouble-maker (Huber) in self-defence; and while he’s hiding, Digges restores his old regime. Jeopardizing his freedom, Cagney rushes back in time to end a riot by the boys (a tubercular kid died after being locked in an unheated cell), though not before Digges falls to his death. The good angel Happy Ending tidies away all awkward questions, and Cagney is asked to stay on as director. Despite the risible script, Cagney is as watch able as ever, and Mayo directs sleekly.

A costume comedy which, despite the best efforts of urbanely professional Saville, looks more like an English pantomime than the breakthrough to Hollywood it was intended as. Wooden old Tom Walls hasn’t much to do as Marlborough, and his hangdog ragbag of an army is no match for ebullient principal Boy Courtneidge. Strutting, pouting, singing, brawling, her women soldier Kit Ross reduces the ruffianly riff-raff around her to a pack of sulky schoolboy’s .If the anti-patriotic populism of music hall songs like “I am Colonel of the cold stream guards” is missing, there’s still a slimy villain of a recruiting sergeant, and the film’s cynicism about martial valour and the glories of war is refreshing.