Okay, okay. First thing’s first, I actually enjoyed the movie to an extent. I was actually interested in the movie, only because I thought Amber Tamblyn and Alexis Bledel are fairly good looking. While expecting to be bored to tears, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants actually ran nicely, though it still had a lot of cheesy things that I couldn’t help but laugh at, getting a loud “Shhh!” from three or four girls at the same time. I’ve seen a lot of movies that simply had no entertainment value whatsoever, most of them being boring drama fests, aka “chick flicks,” but this one actually turned out entertaining. Compare Sisterhood to a movie like Crossroads, and you’d be more than willing to give it an Oscar.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants probably would be meant for girls between the ages of 12 and 16. While one of the girls was 17 and looked like she came directly from Paris Hilton’s fan club, a lot of the movie seems kind of immature in the way that a lot of girls 18 and up would handle things (or maybe not). Tibby, Bridget, Carmen, and Lena are best friends that happen to be splitting up for the first time in the summer coming up. They’re all going their different ways. Bridget (Blake Lively, I will refer to her as Paris Hilton from here on) is going to a soccer camp in Mexico, Lena (Alexis Bledel) is going to visit her grandparents in the beautiful Greece paradise, Carmen’s (America Ferrera) going to visit her dad, and Tibby (Amber Tamblyn) has to stay home and work (I feel ya sister!). The foursome are shopping on their last day together when they try on a pair of pants that just so happens to fit each and every one of them. From Bridget’s skimpy butt to Carmen’s wider hips, the girls buy the pair of pants and decide that each girl should keep them for one week, and then send it to the next person the whole summer in order to keep the girls’ spirits high.

The story jumps from girl to girl as events unfold, and each girl has to deal with something that they think the pants may fix as they anxiously wait for their turn to arrive. Paris has fallen head over heals for one of the soccer coaches (Mike Vogel, can you say child molester!). There wasn’t one time during the movie where Paris didn’t flaunt her butt and boobs all over the place, and I’m sorry, but she didn’t have enough butt to fill those dang shorts she was wearing. Lena has fallen for a guy in Greece who happens to be the grandson of the people that Lena’s grandparents have feuded with for who knows how long. Carmen is in for a rude surprise as she finds out something about her dad that actually hit me emotionally, and Tibby’s having a grand ole’ time back at home. While she’s working and finishing up her documentary, she befriends a girl named Bailey that becomes Tibby’s little filmmaking side kick.

As if you couldn’t guess, all of the girls have to deal with things that prove valuable lessons in the overall scheme of things. The Sisterhood of the Traveling pants deals with life, and all of your friends that come and go inside of it, as well as the hardships that life brings down on us where we think nothing short of a miracle could save us. Like Bailey says during Tibby’s documentary, it all depends on how you use the lemons that life throws at you. If you haven’t figured it out already, the pants weren’t really magical, and so the lessons that the girls learned are what drive the unleaded storyline.

If I were to get on an emotional level with the movie and relate myself to one of the girls in the movie, I’d probably mostly resemble that of Tibby’s summer vacation. She’s stuck at home working at a store that resembles Wal-Mart with her jerk-off of a manager. I don’t really go on vacations, in fact the farthest I usually get to go is downtown at the mall or something, and so I could actually emphasize with Tibby as she stayed at home working while her friends went off on their own adventures for the summer.

Overall
There was a lot of cheesy and horribly scripted lines in the movie that had me laughing out loud in the theater while no one else let out a peep. A lot of things seemed to wrap up in the span of 5 minutes at the very end, as if there wasn’t room in the first 115 minutes to flesh it out a little bit. Besides that and the laughable scenes that could probably be acted better by mannequins, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants wasn’t as bad as a chick flick that I thought it would be. It had its ups and downs, and even if it was meant for 12-16 year olds, Traveling Pants can be enjoyed by any woman, and any guy that doesn’t automatically think a movie’s gay because it deals with real life issues.

Recommended: Yes