Sisters are awesome. I have one. She’s one of my favorite people on Earth. Always has been.
Traveling’s awesome too. I’m always up for a road trip. It’s good for the heart and mind.
Pants are beyond awesome. I love mine and I wear them every day.
How could a movie about sisters, travelling and pants not be awesome too.
I’ll tell you… poor character development and an empty examination of (what should be) an emotionally driven plot.
They explore some heavy themes in this movie: generation effects of family feuds, teenage promiscuity, parental abandonment and childhood leukemia. But each topic is devoid of depth. Each explored with the kind of formula storytelling that calls to mind the average episode of Beverly Hills 90210 and the very special episodes of Growing Pains.
Arguably the most accomplished tale involves a daughter’s pain of isolation at being left behind while her father moves on into a new life without her. It’s actually fairly effective, but ultimately lost in to the overall low quality of the total story – guilty by association you could say.
The other stories are a mess. Poorly resolved, if at all.
Supporting characters that should have had some input into the plot are abandoned and entirely ignored. Hopefully their roles are explored in the book this movie was based on, but that didn’t carry over to the film… wasn’t carried over to the film. As a result the audience is left out of the key elements of the main characters’ struggles.
What kind of work did the family have to do to, in the end, release their granddaughter to date whoever she wants?
What kind of effects did the dying child have on a floundering documentary?
Why did that coach track her down only to offer to have another fling again in five years and why was he a hero for it?
I don’t know. I could probably do the math, but I don’t have any reason to care.
And so the character situations seem odd and clumsy. The travelers do what they want to do and then they are told that they can’t do it anymore and then they do something else and then everything works out.
A few years ago there was a TV show called the Gilmore Girls starring Pants’ Alexis Bledel. The girls had a Friday night tradition of renting, watching and ridiculing bad movies. I like to think that Rory and Ma Gilmore would find this movie endlessly entertaining… everyone else should avoid it.
