Traveling Pants

Traveling Pants, originally uploaded by carriemcm.

When it comes to movies, the chick flick is not my genre of choice. It's not my back-up favorite, or even the back-up for my back-up. But every now and then we all love a feel-good movie, including yours truly, so this afternoon I grabbed a fellow chick and we went to see The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

Out of five stars, I'd give the movie three. It was successful as a feel-good flick, and apparently to the majority of the audience it was quite a tear-jerker. But it also required the audience to suspend a pretty sizable chunk of disbelief, which is where I have to take issue. The story itself is good, albeit one you've likely seen before: a gang of friends from varying backgrounds form a bond of friendship which is tested and survives adversity whereby making each individual and the gang stronger. Add to that the classic coming-of-age story, and you have the Traveling Pants in a nutshell. The story is engaging; the characters are very different from one another and therefore the audience can easily identify with a particular character or her situation; the cinematography is average (though the scenes in Greece are pretty stunning); and the dialogue, well here's where the aforementioned suspension of disbelief is required. The characters in the movie are 16 years old, yet if blindfolded, you'd think they were Yale intellectuals. Okay, this may be a bit of an exaggeration, but c'mon, I was sixteen once, I know what the conversations with my girlfriends sounded like, and they were nothing like this. Wise beyond their years, and beyond the likelihood of any sixteen year old. They had amazing depth of thought, clarity of emotion and articulation of those thoughts. Pah! I'm twenty-nine and rarely have these sorts of exchanges with friends. But maybe I'm just jealous. Oh, and don't even get me started on the sage twelve year old in the film, it's so far beyond the scope of reality, it's laughable.

Having said all that, I did enjoy the movie. It was the perfect Sunday afternoon movie to share with a girlfriend, and was successful at injecting a bit of feel-good into my life (along with a healthy dose of cynicism!). And so with a nice balance of the two I cross #357 off my list: see The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.