Movie Review: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

I watched The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants on Saturday, while huddled under a blanket.

I am a bit torn on the overall review, so perhaps I will list its pros and cons.

Pros:

• Dealt with real-world problems (illness, divorce, sex, anger) without presenting simplistic, watered-down solutions, which is very rare for a teen movie.
• Dealt with the kind of friendships I remember from high school: deep, abiding, accepting — in contrast to many movies where girls are pitted as competition, which is far removed from my own sphere of experience.
• Was not about boys or hating parents.
• Did a really good job of “showing, not telling”.
• Good acting by most of the cast. (One girl was from Real Women Have Curves, another starred in Joan of Arcadia, and another was in Sin City and starred in The Gilmore Girls. The fourth seems to be a newcomer, but held her own.)

Cons:

• After doing a good job of “showing”, the movie insisted on explicitly “telling” as well, sometimes to an excruciating degree. [See below for housemates’ input after I told them how I felt about this over-explanation.]
• Like many movies before it, it seems to believe all “ethnic” people have more fun [read: dance a lot]. Sigh. Don’t ask me; ask Dirty Dancing.
• The premise of the pants was… weird.

I think overall that it had a lot more pros than cons. I think a big problem for me is that whenever I watch a movie like this, I am secretly (or not so secretly) looking for the female Stand By Me — a movie that will last through the decades as a story of childhood bonds — but they never quite hit it. I did enjoy watching it a lot. I don’t know if it was the sickness, but I cried like three times throughout the movie. Some scenes were genuinely wrenching and the acting was entirely transparent.

I’ll give it a 3.75 out of 5.

It’s like the Bladerunner movie.
— Seppo

So it needs the Bladerunner treatment?
— Colin