The Return of the ... Pants

You may recall that I once wrote a belated review of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Well now, in a similarly dated fashion, I bring you my thoughts on The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2:

Maybe the writers realized that in the first movie the pants had sort of taken on a life of their own, causing death and destruction all over the world, because these so called "magical pants" sort of take a secondary role in the sequel. The story instead is intent on making all the teenage girls going to see the movie (who are presumably already incredibly jealous of the four young, attractive female stars) feel totally worthless in the shadow of Carmen, Lena, Tibby, and Bridget.

It's not enough that the actresses who play these girls are rich and famous, the characters are all geniuses/athletes/artists/saucy latinos who get scholarships to good schools because life really does always work out perfectly. The movie chronicles their summer as if they are going through difficult patches of life when really they are doing pretty okay for themselves.

Carmen goes to Yale and yet, her intro monologue is essentially "Wah, I'm at Yale, my life is terrible." I'm guessing if your rich daddy is paying for you to go there, you can probably use some of his money to buy cocaine — and, as Mischa Barton has taught us, cocaine solves everything. She's also sad because she ends up going to Vermont for the summer. She's probably upset because she doesn't know about their cheese yet. I'm going to go out on a limb here and presume Carmen loves cheese. (She's fat.)

Lena has a scholarship to some fancy sounding arts school, I don't actually know if it's a good school because apparently art school is for timid girls like Lena who can't actually draw. Every sketch it shows her working on in this movie looks like something I drew in grade four and my mom refused to put on the fridge for fear of encouraging me. But amazingly, she is going to school free of charge. If this tells the viewer anything, it's that being pretty gets you into school — which, while true, doesn't need to be taught to the unattractive youth of America. Leave the uglies be.

Tibby, the girl who made a crappy documentary and made some girl die of cancer in the first movie, is going to film school at NYU. Within the first few scenes of the movie, she finds out that she has to take a summer class and stay in the city the whole time. To this her friends say, "You're going to be in New York all summer?" and Tibby replies, "Yeah, it sucks." No, actually, it doesn't. Aside from the fact she's living in a world class city, those pants she cares so damn much about fucking TRAVEL. That is the premise of these movies; the pants will come to her and she can wear them to Ground Zero or some shit. Point being, this movie tells you to take New York for granted. Rudy Giuliani would be outraged if he knew about this movie, he'd probably say "9/11 9/11 9/11 Never forget 9/11 Yankees better win a series so help me God."

Then there's Bridget, or "B" as her friends call her. As Carmen so casually mentions, she got on the soccer team at Brown, but guess what? She's still sad about her dead Mom. Boohoo, athletically cry me an ivy league river. Oh yeah, for her summer trip she goes on an archaeological dig in Turkey. And as we learn, it's impossible to enjoy Turkey when your Mom killed herself and you haven't seen your Grandmother in 12 years. Instead you have to hop on a bus and (seemingly) arrive in Alabama overnight to see your Grandma again. Maybe it's just that Blake Lively couldn't shake how much whiter she is from acting on Gossip Girl and just couldn't feel at home again until she was back down South. There was probably some pretty racist dialogue cut from her scenes.

And what about the pants you say? They get passed around and don't really work any miracles or kill any 12-year-olds, so in many ways this movie is pretty disappointing.

However, Bridget scrapes her elbow when there doesn't seem to be any bandages nearby, so maybe she got an infection? Lena never gets any good at drawing despite going to school for it, so it could be that the pants' real power is holding back artistic talent. Then again, Tibby does have a pregnancy scare, so it's more than likely that the pants gave her an abortion. Maybe there's some evil left in them after all.

Unfortunately, there's a happy ending. Well, I don't know if you can call it an ending, the four girls are sitting on a rock in Greece watching a fairly unimpressive sunset (which reinforces my theory that this whole movie was done in one take) and kind of feeling each other up. It's a little weird, actually. I guess that's just it though: these four young starlets are so attractive that they can have anyone they want, but because they are so damn pretty they choose to have each other. Way to turn all of female teenage America into lesbians, pants. Wanda Sykes salutes you.