Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Another film letting us into the everyday lives of adolescent girls. This story involves four girls of almost exactly the same age who met through their mothers who had all taken the same childbirthing class together.

There is the bold and brassy blonde, Bridget; the introspective and shy brunette, Lena; the antiauthoritarian and punkish Tibby; and the chubby Hispanic Carmen. Each girl has her talents and her problems.

It's summer and three of the girls are going out of town to three different places for a month. While shopping, they find a pair of blue jeans that "miraculously" fits all four of them, even the chubby girl, and looks great on all of them.

Because the pants are magical, they reason that the pants are lucky and they decide that each girl will get the pants for a week so that she can have one week of magical luck.

Each girl faces a crisis related to her particular weakness and grows in the process.

Part of the movie is set on the Greek Island of Santorini, and these scenes are frequently gorgeous. Two of the girls, newbie Blake Lively as Bridget and Alexis Bledel of The Gilmore Girls TV series and, more recently, Sin City, are as pretty as girls get. Bledel is positively luminous in many of her scenes and Lively, well, has a great body. Let's put it that way.

America Ferrera, who is best known for starring in Real Women Have Curves, while not conventionally slender, is nevertheless quite appealing.

Strangely, it is probably the least appealing of the girls, Amber Tamblyn of the Joan of Arcadia TV series, who turns in the most affecting performance of all as she learns to love a rather annoying 12 year old with a big problem.

I'm a 210 lb. rather masculine guy, and I don't cry easily, but I got pretty misty in a scene that had the mostly female audience practically bawling.

While, yeah, it's a classic "chick flick," I think many guys will enjoy it as well. I know I certainly don't regret seeing it at all.