I assume there are many good reasons why you might find yourself in a theatre watching the The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants on a Saturday night. I hope to god this is one of them – you’ve had a very long week involving a stranded vehicle on the highway, an identity theft scare, and being fired from a job because a background check revealed an incident in college concerning two underage girls and a hot air balloon. If so, then I am very close to having a good reason. Still, who can blame me for wanting to see Rory Gilmore and Joan of Arcadia team up for what will hopefully be the first of many times on the big screen, besides the entire male heterosexual population?
Other than the fact it was being called a “breezy-fun and profound… take on girls growing into women,” I had no idea what is was about. After trailers for both the Chronicles of Narnia and the new Harry Potter before the movie, I figured they were targeting the same demographic as this film, and it would be a lighthearted fantasy epic. At the very least, I expected the “Sisterhood” to be a teenage group of sanitized new-age Wiccans casting spells on the lame jocks at their high school. I was wrong – there was no witchery at all. And while the movie did have a pair of “magic” pants, they were probably the worst pair of “magic” pants in the history of super-powered clothing. All they did was fit anybody who put them on. I actually own a pair of pants like this – they’re called spandex shorts and they feel great on a summer day!
With no actual enchantment bestowed upon them from their pants, the four main characters, who all went on separate summer vacations, were left to progress in their individual storylines with no supernatural ability – one tried to do anything to sleep with her soccer coach, one tried to do anything to sleep with a Meditteranean lothario, and another one tried to do anything to sleep with some random dude playing video games at the Amco, but in the end she was too distracted by a dying little girl. The remaining Sister was too busy (read: too fat) to be into boys; so she tried to do anything to convince her adopted Aryan family that she was more than a stereotypical Chicano, mostly by launching into typical angry-Hispanic-female rants about how white everyone acted.
I was kind of bothered by the fact that a family movie was geared towards having so much sex with strangers. I was even more bothered by the fact I did not ignore the previous fact and enjoy the X-tina clone running around in Puma shorts on the beach more than I did, which was hardly at all. My favorite part was actually when the senior citizen next to me, up way past his bed time, blew his nose at the end of the movie. I don’t know why – it just was. On a scale of super-clothing, where Green Lantern’s ring is a 1 and Iron Man’s suit is a 10, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants rates a pair of extremely comfortable boxer briefs I bought at The Gap, the numerical equivalent of a 1.9.