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      ‘Mean Girls’ and the New (Home-Schooled) Kid in Class

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      As our critic knows, missing out on the shared experience of school is deeply strange. It’s something Hollywood rarely acknowledges, except in these films.The original 2004 movie “Mean Girls” contained something unusual, both then and now: a main character who was home-schooled. But not that kind of home-schooled.“I know what you’re thinking,” Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) tells us in voice-over. “Home-schooled kids are freaks.” The movie cuts to a tiny bespectacled girl spelling “xylocarp” at the National Spelling Bee. “Or that we’re weirdly religious or something,” Cady continues. A family of boys in suspenders appears; behind them are sandbags displaying paper targets with human outlines. “And on the third day,” one of the boys drawls, “God created the Remington bolt-action rifle, so that man could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals.”“Amen,” his brothers chime in.It was a funny bit no matter who you were back in 2004, dependent on Bush-era perceptions of home-schoolers as, well, weirdly religious, survivalist freaks who insisted that God made the world in six days around 6,000 years ago. Like everything in “Mean Girls” — and, indeed, Tina Fey’s entire body of work — it was an exaggerated caricature based on a kernel of truth. Home-schooling in the 1990s, at least in the United States, was largely insular, and mostly the purview of conservative evangelical Christians with views that could appear extreme even to others in the same pew.I was a junior in college when “Mean Girls” first hit theaters, and the joke tickled me because I’d spent the last few years trying to figure out hierarchies myself: I’d been home-schooled, just like Cady.Well, not just like Cady. I left my private school after the fifth grade to be home-schooled, and a number of the communities my family dipped into along the way were similar to the gun-toting, dinosaur-loving kids from the movie. (The first time I really felt like my youth was represented onscreen was last year’s documentary series “Shiny Happy People.”) I went to seminars where we were taught that dinosaurs did roam the earth at the same time as humans, that the fossil record was designed by God to mess with scientists, and a whole lot of other things.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Mean Girls’ Costume Designer Talks Cast Wardrobe and Addresses Critics

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      Some people have roasted the outfits in the new film, but there were reasons the Plastics got a Gen Z spin. (Among them: social media, fast fashion and the pandemic.)When fans first glimpsed outfits in the new adaptation of “Mean Girls,” they were not shy with feedback on the film’s pink miniskirts and mesh bustiers.On social media, some said the costumes looked cheap, as if they had come from fast-fashion retailers. Others said they did not lean heavily enough on the Y2K style of the original “Mean Girls,” released in 2004. And one online commentator said the costumes seemed like an A.I. image generator’s clumsy response to the prompt: “What do trendy teenagers wear today?”The wardrobes for the film, which was released on Jan. 12, were not created by artificial intelligence but by Tom Broecker, the costume designer for “Saturday Night Live,” where he has worked for nearly 30 years. Mr. Broecker, 61, had no involvement in the original “Mean Girls.” He joined the crew of the adaptation after working with Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels — who were involved in both films — on costumes for “S.N.L.” and for “30 Rock.”Mr. Broecker said the criticism of his work had made him “super, super, super anxious” for the new film’s release. His goal was to reference — but not redo — the wardrobes from the original movie, which were created by the costume designer Mary Jane Fort, by imagining how its high-school-age characters might dress as members of Gen Z.He cited the “sexy Santa” costumes for a holiday talent show scene in both films as an example. In the adaptation, those outfits were influenced by Ariana Grande’s music video for the song “thank u, next,” he said, so he made them a little more sparkly than the plasticky red skirts in the original.More than 600 looks were created for the adaptation by Mr. Broecker and his six-person design team. In the edited interview below, he explains how they came up with the wardrobe — which, he said, should not be judged by trailers and teasers alone.“You’re only getting the bread crumbs,” he said, “when you really want to have the whole 10-course meal.”What did you think of the costuming in the original film?When I saw it then, I thought, This is fun, this is high school in 2004. Watching it now, I go, Oh my God, those poor girls were so sexualized. But that’s 2024 eyes looking at 2004. I know they didn’t feel that way at all, but you look at it now and realize that the world has changed.Where did you look to find inspiration for how Gen Z is dressing?We were very influenced by Instagram and TikTok, and by celebrities like Billie Eilish, Jenna Ortega and Sydney Sweeney. I have a niece who graduated from high school in Indiana last year. I looked through her closet and her Instagram. And I live near N.Y.U., so packs of students walk by my apartment all the time in light-wash, straight-leg jeans, white Nike sneakers and crop tops.What did those references reveal about how people dress now?The early aughts are very influential in the visual landscape of clothing right now. Sometimes I would show Tina certain things and she’d say, Oh my God, I think I wore that before.Other things have changed. Gender fluidity is a big thing for kids. And everyone wants to be comfortable, especially after the pandemic. So I dressed the high schoolers in the movie in athleisure, like North Face, Patagonia and Champion hoodies.Fast fashion has changed how young people shop. How much of that did you include?Probably more than we should have. Two brands we used were Cider and Princess Polly. I stayed away from Shein, but I did find a piece or two secondhand.I kept saying that we have to get into the mind of a high-school student, and that’s how they shop. The directors got rid of a mall scene that was in the original because kids don’t go to the mall anymore.After visuals from the new film were released showing Regina, center, in Isabel Marant trousers and a Bardot mesh corset top, some fans moaned that the film’s costumes looked like A.I.’s idea of how trendy teens dress.JoJo Whilden/Paramount PicturesHow did you differentiate costumes for the Plastics — the three popular girls — from those for the students they reign over?Everyone in the high school has big bags and sneakers, except for the Plastics, who have little purses and heels. They are different than the people who are weighed down by their books and grounded to the floor with their shoes.Did you spend more of your budget on clothes for the Plastics?Basically the Plastics got all the money. For Regina George (Reneé Rapp), we did Isabel Marant, streetwear like Off-White and a lot of vintage stuff. Tom-Ford-era 1990s Gucci was the inspiration for her homecoming dress.Regina’s black homecoming dress with a front leg slit was inspired by clothes Tom Ford designed for Gucci in the 1990s, a decade that has influenced Gen Z style.Jojo Whilden/Paramount PicturesWhy do you think people have reacted so strongly to the costumes in the adaptation?I didn’t realize the nostalgia for the original. It’s hard to have something stand on its own when something exists that people love. But this is not that, and 2024 is not 2004. We have changed how we feel about a lot of things. As the tagline says, this isn’t your mom’s “Mean Girls.” More

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      Paul Giamatti, Bradley Cooper, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and More Celebrities at the National Board of Review gala

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      The stars were among the 17 honorees at the annual National Board of Review gala, as awards season ramps up.On a not-at-all red carpet inside Cipriani 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, Da’Vine Joy Randolph was glowing.“The fact that these people actually even seen my work is just mind-blowing,” said the actress, a star of “The Holdovers,” who was being honored with the National Board of Review’s best supporting actress prize at its annual film awards gala, just days after she had won her first Golden Globe on Sunday for her role in the film.A few feet away on the gray carpet was Celine Song, who came to accept the prize for best directorial debut for “Past Lives.” She was sporting a tuxedo jacket, a long skirt and a bow tie.“Because the movie is so personal, any time somebody connects to the film, I always feel less lonely; I feel very seen and understood and embraced,” said Ms. Song, who based the romantic film partly on her own experience with a childhood friend.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Phill Niblock, Dedicated Avant-Gardist of Music and Film, Dies at 90

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      Making music with no melody or rhythm and films with no plot, he became a darling of New York’s experimental underground.Phill Niblock, an influential New York composer and film and video artist who opened new sonic terrain with hauntingly minimalist works incorporating drones, microtones and instruments as diverse as bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies, often accompanied by his equally minimalist moving images, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.His partner, Katherine Liberovskaya, said he died in a hospital of heart failure after years of cardiac procedures.Mr. Niblock had no formal musical training. Nevertheless, he came to be hailed as a leading light in the world of experimental music, not only as an artist himself but also, beginning in the 1970s, as the director, with the choreographer Elaine Summers, of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for dance, avant-garde music and other media. He served as the foundation’s sole director from 1985 until his death, and he was also the curator of the foundation’s record label, XI.His loft on Centre Street in Lower Manhattan served as a performance space for the foundation. It was also a social nexus for boundary-pushing musicians and composers like John Cage, Arthur Russell, David Behrman and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.In an Instagram post on Tuesday, Mr. Moore wrote that Mr. Niblock’s work summoned a “collective consciousness which gave it its own genuine engagement with listener and performer alike.”Mr. Niblock’s music was marked by densely layered sound textures consisting of tones, close to one another in pitch, that made only very small movements for extended durations. “Minimalism to me is about stripping out things, and looking at a very small segment — to get rid of melody and rhythm and typical harmonic progressions,” Mr. Niblock said in an interview with Frieze magazine last summer. He added that his pieces “don’t really ‘develop,’ as that word is used in music.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      With Producers Guild Nominations, the Oscar Picture Gets Clearer

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      “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” made the cut as they did for the directors and actors groups. But “The Color Purple” was left out.Rounding out a busy awards-season week that included the Golden Globes and nominations from Hollywood’s directors and actors guilds, the Producers Guild of America announced the 10 films nominated for its best feature award on Friday. As expected, the group included “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie,” twinned box-office behemoths that have so far dominated awards season just as they ruled the summer.Here is the producers’ list of feature-film nominees:“American Fiction”“Anatomy of a Fall”“Barbie”“The Holdovers”“Killers of the Flower Moon”“Maestro”“Oppenheimer”“Past Lives”“Poor Things”“The Zone of Interest”The producers organization is considered the group with the best track record of presaging the Oscars. Over the last five years, only six movies snubbed by the this guild went on to receive an Oscar nomination for best picture.Three of those came just last year, when PGA picks “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” and “The Whale” were supplanted by eventual Oscar nominees “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Triangle of Sadness” and “Women Talking.” Those substitutions illustrate the difference in sensibilities between the populist-leaning producers and Oscar voters, who are more inclined to support international and independent films.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      With ‘Mean Girls,’ When Trailers Hit Mute on the Musical

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      With “Mean Girls,” “Wonka” and “The Color Purple,” why have studios spent much of their marketing budget downplaying and disguising their movie musicals?Regina George has a secret. She sings.Despite what its marketing might suggest, “Mean Girls” (in theaters), the latest in a set of pink-accented nesting dolls, is irrefutably a movie musical. Adapted from the 2018 Broadway musical, which was itself based on the 2004 film, which was in turn inspired by the 2002 nonfiction book “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” this new version has singing. It has dancing. It has one delectable moment in which the members of the school marching band raise their saxophones and tubas high.Barring a split-second shot of the band, you wouldn’t know that from the film’s trailers. The first trailer, from November — set to Olivia Rodrigo’s “get him back!” — included no original music. It was made to look instead like a vaguely edgier remix of the 2004 film.The second trailer, which arrived on Jan. 3, offers a line or two of “Meet the Plastics,” then cedes the soundtrack to a new song, a collaboration between Megan Thee Stallion and Renée Rapp, who plays Regina, the suburban high school’s apex predator. That song, “Not My Fault,” is admittedly in the actual movie. It plays over the credits.These “Mean Girls” trailers join “Wonka,” which opened Dec. 15 and “The Color Purple,” which opened on Christmas Day, as films that have spent much of their marketing budget downplaying and disguising their vexed status as movie musicals. At the close of the “Wonka” trailer, Hugh Grant’s Oompa-Loompa threatens to break into song, only for Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka to say, “I don’t think I want to hear that.” This from a character who invents a chocolate that makes people burst into song!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Lift’ Review: Kevin Hart Is a Hero in This Flimsy Action Film

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      This poorly written action vehicle pits Kevin Hart as a hero against an eco-terrorist villain.Kevin Hart plays Cyrus, a master thief, in the undercooked heist flick, “Lift,” directed by F. Gary Gray. Written by Daniel Kunka, the film consists of luxurious locations like Tuscany and Venice and elaborate set pieces including a speedboat chase in the opening scene, but they are not infused with any sense of suspense or danger.The film relies on a cartoonish villain, the eco-terrorist Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno), who wants to game the stock market by paying some shadowy hackers half a billion dollars in gold bars to disrupt the world’s water supply. Beyond the windfall Jorgensen will get from shorting water utility stocks, it’s unclear what he gains from this elaborate ruse.An Interpol agent, Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), enlists Cyrus to steal the passenger plane carrying the gold bars before any damage can be done. Although Abby and Cyrus are old flames, the film doesn’t pick up any romantic steam, either, thanks to what passes for banter. “I was looking at the questions that weren’t being asked,” Cyrus tells Abby. “Too cool for school, huh?” she says.Though he tries to play Cyrus in the mold of Tom Cruise in “Mission: Impossible” or Robert Redford in “Sneakers” (two similarly framed heist films), as a leading man, Hart is stuck in neutral. You never understand why Abby would fall for him or why his team, composed of broad characters who seem to function solely as the source of creaky quips, are so steadfast. Hart possesses neither the charisma of Cruise nor the charm of Redford necessary to shoulder these action movie mechanics, a failure that demonstrates what happens when character actors are told they’re movie stars.LiftRated PG-13 for cheap violence and sexless romance. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Role Play’ Review: Mommy by Day, Killer by Night

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      Kaley Cuoco plays a woman balancing a life of domesticity with her career as an assassin in this spineless comedy thriller.Kaley Cuoco may be our newest caper girl Friday, but even her flame of charisma tapers off early in “Role Play,” directed by Thomas Vincent. Calling on the same knack for high jinks that she perfected on the Max series “The Flight Attendant,” the onetime sitcom actress plays Emma, a suburban mom with a secret: she is actually an internationally-wanted assassin.A minivan wife leading a double life as a professional killer is an agreeable enough premise for a broad action comedy, but the movie’s biggest idea lies not in content, but structure. As the hit woman and her clueless but loyal husband, Dave (David Oyelowo), get sucked into an improbable game of cat and mouse with her former employer, the film takes pride in flashing back to preceding scenes to unveil new details. The point is that Emma is always one step ahead — even of the audience.These mini-twists might have felt exciting had the film waited longer before each reveal; as it stands, the stretches between scene and flashback are shorter than commercial breaks. It is perhaps needless to add that the story often stretches credulity. What does Emma’s ex-boss have against her? Why aren’t the F.B.I. all over Emma’s recent sloppy murder? One is quick to forgive faulty plot machinations when an action movie really revs; “Role Play” merely spins its wheels.Role PlayRated R. She’s number one with a bullet. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More