The Banger Sisters

"The Banger Sisters", a project by first time director Bob Dolman (weirdly enough credited as writer on George Lucas's fantasy spectacle Willow), features an impressive three Academy Award winners: Susan Sarandon, Goldie Hawn, and the wonderful Geoffrey Rush.

The story is quickly told: Sarandon and Hawn used to be groupies in the early seventies, shagging every rockstar in L.A. and taking pictures of their tonkers. Now in their fifties, Hawn is a surgically enhanced jobless lowlife, while Sarandon is a prissy, upper class dame with two kids, a dog, a mansion and a politician husband. One day, while realising she's losing her pulling power and her complete lack of funds, Hawn drives from L.A. to Phoenix to find her long lost friend and ask her for some money, on her way picking up anal OCD sufferer and blocked writer Rush, turning around his life and dissolving his inhibitions. While reconnecting with an initially reluctant Sarandon, she manages to shake up the very protected existence of herself and her family.

Now, the very fact that this movie featured Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon and was very clearly targeted at the female audience well above thirty made this flick clearly not my first choice for an evening in front of the TV, but as my significant other was clearly going to watch it (and I get my fair share of the T.V., including at the moment the whole series of Firefly on DVD, so I can't really complain), I sat through this: To be honest, it's quite amusing at times, but this movie is clearly schizophrenic, with the Rush/Hawn story clearly more interesting and unpredictable than the bog standard buddy - movie that is the rest. Drab direction (although glossy camerawork from Karl Walter Lindenlaub, the man who brought you Universal Soldier, Stargate and Independence Day) and a terrible, moralizing end doesn't make the movie more enticing either. So, it doesn't qualify as neither chick flick, nor comedy nor family movie.

Bit of a waste of celluloid, but that's just me...