There are few things in life more satisfying than a perfectly fitting pair of pants, and no movie has captured that feeling on-screen more perfectly than The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The problem of finding such a mythic article of clothing has plagued mankind for decades. But in the 2000s comedyThe Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, four best friends somehow manage to find a pair that fits all of them perfectly, despite the women each being different sizes and shapes. This is the premise to possibly one of the most essential girls' trip movies ever produced.
sisterhood of the traveling pants movie
Directed by Ken Kwapis and written by Delia Ephron, the movie was based on the New York Times Bestseller of the same name by Ana Brashares and follows Lena (Alexis Bledel), Tibby (Amber Tamblyn), Carmen (America Ferrera), and Bridget (Blake Lively), as they spend their first summer apart each promising to send that magic pair of jeans to each other to keep in touch and help them on their adventures. That's right, this is a girls' trip movie that doesn't even entail the friends traveling together, and it still makes it one of the best.
If not for the extremely simple yet universal premise of perfectly fitting pants, the movie actually touches on some important themes, especially for a teen oriented movie. In terms of the travel, the movie is split between scenes from each place one of the friends goes. Lena, travels to Santorini Greece, meeting family and exploring the place of her roots. Bridget travels to Baja California to participate in a soccer camp. Carmen excitedly takes a bus to North Carolina to spend time with her father, and Tibby well, Tibby stays home. Each member of the squad encounters their own challenges and attribute the overall out of the ordinary experiences they have on the magic jeans.
First in the line of receiving the pants is Lena who finds herself in Greece visiting family she had never met before.The jeans travel all the way from Bethesda, Maryland to Greece and the many steps of that journey are shown in the form of a montage of short moments at the various package processing points, a recurring sequence throughout the movie. While there she is sporting the magic jeans when she falls into the ocean only to be rescued by the charming and handsome Kostas (Michael Rady), a local fisherman and charmer extraordinaire.
The jeans are more of a passive observer of the four friends' summer away, but nonetheless they allow the Sisterhood to stay connected and supportive of each member. The look into these girls' friendship could've been achieved with a road trip movie or perhaps a trip through the woods gone awry, but it wouldn't have captured the more relatable event of growing older and apart from your friends as life takes you to different spots. That's what makes the movie so essential, it is able to balance the multiple locales of the girls' travel with the various themes explored throughout. Additionally, the universal idea that a good fitting pair of pants really can provide that little extra something one needs. The trip aspect of this movie isn't only the jeans and friends physically traveling themselves, but the transformations that occur in each member of the Sisterhood as the summer goes by.
In the case of these movies then, the movie franchise skipped past the novels and chose to tell the story in two movies rather than adapting all four books separately. That being said, three years after The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 was released, Sisterhood author Ann Brashares published a fifth book called Sisterhood Everlasting. This installment of the series sees Tibby, Lena, Carmen and Bridget as grownups with careers and romances, and longing to reunite their sisterhood, despite the jeans being long gone. The existence of Sisterhood Everlasting has brought about the desire for another movie past its YA roots.
While there has yet to be any more Sisterhood movies, throughout the past few years there have been hints that Hollywood is attempting to revitalize these movies. Back in 2014, The Hollywood Reporter shared that there were plans to adapt Sisterhood Everlasting into a movie directed by Ken Kwapis once again from a screenplay by Liz Garcia. Like the book, the movie would pick up with the four friends a decade after the events of the fourth summer with the traveling pants as adults with a girls trip reunion. 2ff7e9595c
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