Lindsay Lohan has aged a bit since she played Hallie/Annie in the remake of The Parent Trap a few years ago. She has finally reached that age at which life can get very, very confusing … as it does for her character Cady Heron in this movie based on what would appear to be a non-fiction book about the trials and tribulations of being a teen-age girl among other teen-age girls.

Cady Heron (Lohan) is the daughter of a pair of zoologists who have spent most of the last few years in Africa. “Naturally” Cady has been home-schooled during this time. Home-schoolers appear generally to be better educated than their contemporaries in the publich school system, but more poorly socialized, and Cady is no exception. Now parents have returned home and have placed Cady in the local high-school, where she has to sink or swim in a veritable swamp of cliques, jealousies, rivalries and incomprehensible hierarchies. Naturally, she immediately falls in with a pair of other outsiders, Goth Lizzy (Janis Ian) and Gay Damian (Daniel Franzese). Lizzy at once sets out to use Cady as the point person for infiltrating the Plastics, the aristocratic and domineering style-girls’ clique, headed up by Regina George (viciously blonde Rachel MacAdams). It would be nice to say that Cady is ethically prevented from engaging in such underhanded tactics, but she is apparently as ethically challenged as the average teen-ager, and sets out to destroy the Plastics with gusto — in the process, almost destroying the school.

An engaging film. Watch particularly for the scenes in which Coach Karr (who, it turns out, is hardly a paragon of virtue) is teaching a group of uncomprehending teen-agers a course in sex education. “Don’t have sex! Because you will get Chlamydia … and die!” (“Chlamydia”, if I remember correctly from the blackboard in the film, is spelled “Klamidia”.)