I will see Labor Pains, no matter what you say

So Lindsay Lohan's been in the news again. I'm not here to defend her choice of words, which though odd was probably not racist in any traditional sense. I'm here to defend my fondness for her, which has not died despite her terrible behavior and her even worse movies.

First, let's take a minute to remember her charming and delightful early days.

Behold the precociousness of her in the remake of The Parent Trap:



That uppercrusty English accent is totally recognizable!

Really good child actors with few exceptions (Jodie Foster, um...I can't think of any other exceptions...Scott Baio? Dean Stockwell, I guess) grow up to be...really good child actors. Think of Macaulay Culkin in Party Monster. He is perfect in the role, but only because he is a terrible over-actor playing a terrible over-actor. Christina Ricci has carved out a fairly respectable carreer almost entirely made of camp. But speaking of Jodie Foster, the first thing I remember seeing Lindsay in was the remake of Freaky Friday, in which she plays a Rebellious Teenager (or the Disney version of one). Freaky Friday isn't an important movie, and it does nothing new, but it is exactly what it sets out to be: cute, fun, competent, predictable. This is what I want from a PG/PG-13 teen comedy.

Which brings me to Mean Girls, a movie that slightly exceeds expectations on almost every scale. It's smarter than it should be. The cast is better than it looks. The jokes are funnier than you would expect -- people often point out that Tina Fey, who wrote the screenplay, was the first woman head writer on Saturday Night Live, which is probably true, but she was the head writer during one of the show's least funny eras. And yet.

I was dragged to Mean Girls (by Anna, who is my reliable date for lame movies, from Uptown Girls to Mamma Mia. So far). Before it left the theater, I had seen it two more times. Lindsay Lohan plays Cady, a high school junior transplanted from Africa, where she was home schooled, to a public school in suburban Evanston, Illinois. She is befriended by "art freaks" Damien and Janis Ian (hm), then betrays them on a climb up the social ladder of high school. Sounds like a boring cliche, and it is a cliche, but the script is so neatly crafted, the characters just three-dimensional enough, that the movie overall succeeds where it could very easily have failed. Mean Girls isn't flawless (it could be a little less homophobic, for one, and after repeated viewings the "Asian hotties" are truly cringe-worthy) but it's close.

LL starred in a few other fine-but-forgettable teen movies (Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Herbie the Love Bug). And she was in I Know Who Killed Me, a movie almost but not quite absurd and unsatisfying enough to be entertaining as an example of How Not to Make A Movie. Then there was Georgia Rule. Garry Marshall has directed a fair number of my least favorite movies, but Georgia Rule is in a category of its own. It feels like it was written for the Lifetime network, but it's rated R. It is sappy yet brutal, naive yet loveless. I really really hated it.

Still, on the strength of my Mean Girls affection, I decided to give Just My Luck a chance when I noticed it in the grocery store DVD rental box, and I thought it was fine. It was cute and fun and competent and predictable, just like I wanted it to be. And she was in Robert Altman's last movie, A Prairie Home Companion. For me, the PHC movie was just like the radio show - awesome when it's people performing songs and kinda pointless otherwise.

Anyway, I guess I would just like Lindsay Lohan to ignore Roger Ebert's advice that she "move on to more challenging roles." It seems clear that she can neither choose nor carry a heavy movie. But that's okay! We need more charming fun predictable character actors, and she can totally do that.

Oh, one more thing. Kristin provided the only plausible explanation of the weird line in LL's Access Hollywood interview. Turns out, she never said "our first colored president." Turns out, she said "our first unicorn president." Go watch it again. Now. She totally says unicorn. UNICORN.