"The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" is, like, way above most teen girl movies in showing four strong-minded, heterosexual young women with divergent interests.
While they are uniformly middle-class suburbanites, they are not in the usual high school bubble and have some life issues to face, like a somewhat more substantive version of the flashbacks in "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood." The magic realism of the used jeans from a thrift shop (see, they aren't mall rats) that fit four girls with three different body types is a sweet way to link their "what I did on my summer vacation" as they are turning 17, since they can't I'm or e-mail or text to Baja California and a Greek isle.
The film is only as strong as each girl's story, so it's almost three-quarters successful.
As she was in "Real Women Have Curves," America Ferrera, as the writer, is the stand out, physically (upfront in her voluptuousness), ethnically and linguistically (wielding her Spanish like a sword), and learning to channel her anger without compromising her spunk in dealing with her divorced dad.
Blake Lively, a new actress closest in actual age to the characters, plays a type of young woman we are only beginning to see in TV and movies, a Title IX baby who is very much not a tomboy as she combines her awesome athletic prowess with her sexuality like a cruise missile, jail bait or not. So I was disappointed that the lesson she learns is that her single-minded competitiveness, in either field of action, is criticized like a boy's would never be in a film and is negatively attributed to her mother's suicide, as both a grief tool and anti-inherited depression insurance, as if endorphins rushes are, like, a bad thing. But isn't her behavior the exact kind that the experts say women need to develop in order to succeed? I wonder if it's screenwriters Delia Ephron and Elizabeth Chandler, regular chick flick writers, or original author Ann Brashares who so meanly would prevent this striking young woman from ever being a CEO? No wonder what she learns doesn't help her depressed dad at all.
The other two are more conventional. Amber Tamblyn, sadly no longer to be "Joan of Arcadia," doesn't quite cut it as a goth but her determination to make a "suck-umentary" video while she works at a Wal-Mart clone (a quirky take on "The Good Girl") at least looks very contemporary.
Not surprisingly the tale that fans say has been changed the most from the book, "Gilmore Girl" Alexis Bleidel's portrait of the young artist is the weakest, the most conventional, the least interesting or even believable. Though it is nice to see on screen another girl who is at least supposed to be a hyphenated ethnic American, the "Big Fat Greek Wedding" clichés about such relatives are not avoided.
The secondary characters are considerably weaker, except that it's nice to see Rachel Ticotin, even briefly as a down to earth mom. Bradley Whitford is just opaquely one-note as the neglectful dad, and poor Nancy Travis's stereotyped chirpy fiancée is just wince-able, even if her Southern accent weren't inconsistent.
Another character has a groan-able case of Movie Star Disease that is eye-rollingly melodramatic, contradicting her character's sprightly storytelling abilities before vanishing like the Cheshire cat.
Evidently it's the magic of the jeans that redeems the characters with Y chromosomes as these guys are extraordinarily gentlemanly, especially the college students, above and beyond their call (and evidently somewhat more so than they are in the book which fans are attributing to the PG rating). Only one gets to be more than a cardboard hunk, an amusing Asian video gamer who is quite charming on his passion.
I did stay through enough of the credits to appreciate that three-quarters of the behind-the-camera workers were female, though Ken Kwapis was a surprising choice as director.
The production design was appropriately suffocatingly pink and red, but that didn't explain why the cinematography had to look quite so sun-bleached to the point of whiting out - to recall distressed jeans perhaps? The song selections on the soundtrack are not particularly illuminating.
I don't see why anyone who wasn't once or will be a 16 year old girl would go to see this movie, even with the usual end-of-date bribe.
While they are uniformly middle-class suburbanites, they are not in the usual high school bubble and have some life issues to face, like a somewhat more substantive version of the flashbacks in "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood." The magic realism of the used jeans from a thrift shop (see, they aren't mall rats) that fit four girls with three different body types is a sweet way to link their "what I did on my summer vacation" as they are turning 17, since they can't I'm or e-mail or text to Baja California and a Greek isle.
The film is only as strong as each girl's story, so it's almost three-quarters successful.
As she was in "Real Women Have Curves," America Ferrera, as the writer, is the stand out, physically (upfront in her voluptuousness), ethnically and linguistically (wielding her Spanish like a sword), and learning to channel her anger without compromising her spunk in dealing with her divorced dad.
Blake Lively, a new actress closest in actual age to the characters, plays a type of young woman we are only beginning to see in TV and movies, a Title IX baby who is very much not a tomboy as she combines her awesome athletic prowess with her sexuality like a cruise missile, jail bait or not. So I was disappointed that the lesson she learns is that her single-minded competitiveness, in either field of action, is criticized like a boy's would never be in a film and is negatively attributed to her mother's suicide, as both a grief tool and anti-inherited depression insurance, as if endorphins rushes are, like, a bad thing. But isn't her behavior the exact kind that the experts say women need to develop in order to succeed? I wonder if it's screenwriters Delia Ephron and Elizabeth Chandler, regular chick flick writers, or original author Ann Brashares who so meanly would prevent this striking young woman from ever being a CEO? No wonder what she learns doesn't help her depressed dad at all.
The other two are more conventional. Amber Tamblyn, sadly no longer to be "Joan of Arcadia," doesn't quite cut it as a goth but her determination to make a "suck-umentary" video while she works at a Wal-Mart clone (a quirky take on "The Good Girl") at least looks very contemporary.
Not surprisingly the tale that fans say has been changed the most from the book, "Gilmore Girl" Alexis Bleidel's portrait of the young artist is the weakest, the most conventional, the least interesting or even believable. Though it is nice to see on screen another girl who is at least supposed to be a hyphenated ethnic American, the "Big Fat Greek Wedding" clichés about such relatives are not avoided.
The secondary characters are considerably weaker, except that it's nice to see Rachel Ticotin, even briefly as a down to earth mom. Bradley Whitford is just opaquely one-note as the neglectful dad, and poor Nancy Travis's stereotyped chirpy fiancée is just wince-able, even if her Southern accent weren't inconsistent.
Another character has a groan-able case of Movie Star Disease that is eye-rollingly melodramatic, contradicting her character's sprightly storytelling abilities before vanishing like the Cheshire cat.
Evidently it's the magic of the jeans that redeems the characters with Y chromosomes as these guys are extraordinarily gentlemanly, especially the college students, above and beyond their call (and evidently somewhat more so than they are in the book which fans are attributing to the PG rating). Only one gets to be more than a cardboard hunk, an amusing Asian video gamer who is quite charming on his passion.
I did stay through enough of the credits to appreciate that three-quarters of the behind-the-camera workers were female, though Ken Kwapis was a surprising choice as director.
The production design was appropriately suffocatingly pink and red, but that didn't explain why the cinematography had to look quite so sun-bleached to the point of whiting out - to recall distressed jeans perhaps? The song selections on the soundtrack are not particularly illuminating.
I don't see why anyone who wasn't once or will be a 16 year old girl would go to see this movie, even with the usual end-of-date bribe.