The jeans referred to in the second half of the title "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" are discovered in a thrift
store by the four 16-year-old girls referred to in the other half. They have magical properties, the pants do, in that they fit each girl perfectly despite wide variances in the girls' figures. Many women would kill -- and I mean literally take the life of another person -- to have pants this forgiving and flattering. The girls, all born the same week and friends ever since in their Washington, D.C., suburb, are about to spend the summer in four different places before reuniting for the senior year in high school. Since the pants are clearly enchanted, they agree to pass them around, each girl having them for a week before sending them on to the next wearer. The pants are not to be washed (lest the magic properties be stain-lifted away), and letters describing the girls' exploits in the pants are to accompany them on their journey, so that all may be edified by the blue jeans' beneficence. In other words, this is a movie about what four girls did on their summer vacations, and the pants are irrelevant. Based on Ann Brashares' bestselling novel that I have not read (nor indeed even heard of until a couple weeks ago), "Sisterhood" deserves credit for appealing to its core audience of teenage girls without pandering to them. It deals with mature themes such as terminal illness and teen sexuality, and even gets into one girl's introspective dilemma of realizing she is not the person she thought she was, yet keeps a patina of fluffiness over the whole thing. It's a serious movie, but a fun one.
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