Tina Fey's Mean Girls (Blu-ray) may be the smartest movie about high school ever made (and man, do those bright-hued high school fashions pop off the screen in HD). Directed by Mark Waters, whose brother Daniel wrote 1989's Heathers, which some consider the great high-school movie, Mean Girls is actually better. Fey is an infinitely sharper writer than Waters, God's gift to incisive one-liners, and she's unburdened by his bitterness, which gives Heathers some ultra-violent scenes that are hard to watch after Columbine.

As the unusually intellectual extras demonstrate, Mean Girls is both a fall-down-funny satirical comedy and a movie of ideas. Some of the scenes spring straight from Rosalind Wiseman's wise bestseller Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossips, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence.

Only it's not boring. Fresh-faced and radiant, showing no trace of nightclub drug or alcohol ravages, Lindsay Lohan excels as a math whiz raised in Africa, now befuddled and helpless in the jungles of a Chicago suburban school. The kids have fun in fantasy sequences, lunging at each other like jungle animals, then reverting to their overtly polite yet covertly savage selves. "In Girl World, all the fighting had to be sneaky." Most savage of all are the school's ruling trio, far meaner than The Heathers -- the Plastics. Lohan's goth-kid outcast pals convince her to infiltrate and subvert the Plastics, but the mean girls' mindset subverts her instead. All the kid actors do superb work; in a supporting role as one of their teachers, Fey is surprisingly uncertain. She's a lot better on SNL and 30 Rock.

In the voice-over commentary by Fey, Waters, and producer Lorne Michaels, we learn that saucer-eyed Amanda Seyfried (Big Love, Mamma Mia!) was originally a runner-up to play the mean girl in chief. She's much better suited to the dumb-bunny sidekick mean girl, who can sense changes in the weather via the tinglings in her immense breasts. Rachel McAdams is unbeatable as the main mean girl, who Lohan's scheming interloper sets out to destroy. It was Lorne Michaels' idea to make Seyfried the dumb character, which she aced, lofting her career to hyperspace. Jonathan Bennett got the role of the dreamy hunk they fight over because his chiseled punim and nice-guy vibe reminded Fey of Jimmy Fallon, her "Weekend Update" colleague.

I'm not absolutely sure a movie this dialogue-based really makes the most of Blu-ray's capabilities, except in a few action scenes (a riot in the hallways, a party where Lohan does Jell-o shots and the camera gets nauseously drunk while teens go wild in tight spaces). But the extras are solid, and the film warrants the commentary. It's remarkable how much censorship affected the film. Originally, when Lohan first walks into her new lunchroom, a kid accosted her and asked, "Is your cherry popped? Would you like us to assign someone to pop your cherry?" Teen virginity being sacred, this was changed to the more puzzling line, "Is your muffin buttered?" Waters says this left many "kinda scratching their heads -- is this some cool new teen slang we don't know?"

The gym teacher whose health class warns kids that sex will kill them originally told them all about "pace and friction," but that had to go. The girl accused of "making out with a hot dog" in the controversial book of insults that gets the girls in trouble with principal Tim Meadows was originally supposed to be accused of "masturbating with a frozen hot dog" (the girl protests in her defense, "That was just one time!"). One line had to be dubbed over: Watch McAdams' lips when the principal tells her he can't read a line in the book, and she says helpfully that the line reads, "Fat Whore." What she's really saying is "Vag Odor." Ixnay on the vajayjay jokes when you're going for a PG-13 rating. Like parents would even have known what "vag odor" was!

My favorite insight is that Waters ordered McAdams to base her top mean girl performance on Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. The role was also inspired by an actress Lorne Michaels once met for lunch; Lorne said when you eat lunch with her, "She finishes her meal, and then it looks like she's going to eat your meal, and eat your fingers if she's still hungry." Of course this is a great Hollywood movie about high school. Hollywood is high school.

Besides the commentary, there are the following pretty darn good extras: A 25-minute feature on teen archetypes; Only the Strong Survive, a ten-minute feature; The Politics of Girl World, about self-image problems; the ten-minute Plastic Fashion, about how they got those costumes; about 12 minutes of deleted scenes, some with director and writer commentary; the trailer for the film; and some promotional shorts that show you how hard it is to market something smart in an age of stupid teen cinema. In all, a worthy package.

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