The now-accepted critical take on this teenybopper triptych is that Mean Girls is the smart one, 13 [going on 30] is the pretty one, and N[ew ]Y[ork ]M[inute] is the pathetic wannabe you'd just rather not tell about the club meeting at all. But all three of these movies subverted my expectations: one was a little better than I'd hoped, one a little worse, while the third was, properly speaking, not a "movie" at all, but a brief, fevered glimpse into a previously unsuspected entertainment limbo that haunts our own world like some nightmarish alternate universe ... Chained since the age of one to the drudgery of churning out TV series and straight-to-video movies for children (almost 40 of them in their 17 grim years on earth), these youthful media moguls have the burned-out gaze and hangdog servility of an interchangeable pair of organ-grinder monkeys.

- liz penn, "Girl Movies '04: The Good, the Bad and the Sparkly," the high sign may 21, 2004