Monday, March 13, 2006

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants




Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is based on a novel that tells the classic teen girl coming-of-age story. Four girls, friends their whole lives, are about to spend their first summer apart at age 16. They find a pair of jeans that magically fits all of them even though they are different sizes. They decide that while they are apart, they will share the pants, each wearing them for a week and sending them on to the next person with a letter about what happened while wearing them.

This is the vehicle for telling the stories of what happens to each during the summer. One girl visits her grandparents in Greece and experiences forbidden love that helps her to come out of her shell. Another girl aggressively stalks a young soccer coach at soccer camp until he becomes her first, after which she is left feeling empty, realizing that sleeping around cannot replace the love of her dead mother. A third girl finds a terminally-ill 12-year-old neighbor attached to her as she works on a film project. The friendship gives her a less cynical perspective of the world. Finally, the fourth girl goes to visit her dad to find out he is remarrying into an instant family and she struggles with his ability to parent kids that aren’t his while he was never able to be there for her while she was growing up.

This movie has nothing to offer a Muslim audience. The stories of the girls with the film project and the girl trying to come to terms with her dad’s new relationships would have made a fine movie. But the addition of the other two stories ruins the appeal because they turn the movie into a teen dating and fornication movie. While the movie does not show a lot visually nor does it glorify premarital sex, it regards it as par for the course as part of the coming-of-age of a teenage girl.

2 comments:

musicalchef said...

I haven't seen the movie, but it reminds me a lot of "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" a movie based on one of Ray Bradbury's short stories. It's about five men who are each too poor to buy a suit, but they pool their money to buy one and take turns wearing it. It's a really funny movie and relatively clean.

otowi said...

Hmmm, maybe that's where the author got her idea.

I'll see if Netflix has it maybe....