The Banger Sisters (2002)

Suzette (Goldie Hawn) gets fired from Whisky A Go-Go in Los Angeles. She decides to go to Phoenix to reconnect with Lavinia Kingsley (Susan Sarandon) who used to be her best friend as "The Banger Sisters". On the way, she picks up peculiar writer Harry Plummer (Geoffrey Rush) who claims to be going to Phoenix to kill his father. Lavinia is now a conservative mother to valedictorian Hannah (Erika Christensen) and driving-impaired Ginger (Eva Amurri Martino) and wife to lawyer Raymond (Robin Thomas). Suzette is staying with Harry at a hotel when she encounters Hannah freaking out after dropping acid during prom. None of her family knows Vinnie's former wild life.Hawn and Sarandon are good together. Rush and Hawn are even better together as opposites. The girls discovering their mother is compelling. It would be better to have them have more heart-to-heart scenes with Vinnie. A girls' sit-down could be a powerful emotional talk. This movie is much better than expected although my expectations were extremely low.

The movie was an enormous surprise. I expected s0me 90 minutes of thin fun, and I got to see one of the best, simple small movies about the life we most often let pass by and let it to very few we usually consider half wrecks to live it, not understanding what we've done with what was given to us and we did refuse. I don't expect this review to help you, but it helps me to see it clearer. Most reviewers did understand nothing, and demonstrated so that people feel better when aging as working, seeing, loving, behaving as zombies, in other words like 90% of those who drove us crazy when we were 16 or 22. Thank you all very much for reading this! Besides Goldie Hawn who shines like a handful of diamonds the director succeeded to put together an excellent team of first class actors, they all together give you so many hands full with diamonds that you look like Shiva, the multi-armed Hindu God :-) Mihai-Robert Soran-Schwartz

In Los Angeles, when the bartender Suzette (Goldie Hawn) is fired from the club where she works, she decides to travel to Phoenix and visit her friend and also former groupie of twenty years ago Vinnie (Susan Sarandon) to borrow some money. While on the road, she runs out of gas and without any money, she accepts to bring the stressed loser writer Harry Plummer (Geoffrey Rush) and in return he would pay for the gasoline. When she meets her old friend, now Mrs. Lavinia Kingsley, she finds a very conservative and traditional housewife, married with the successful lawyer Raymond Kingsley (Robin Thomas) and mother of two complicated teenagers, Hanna and Ginger. Their interaction along a few days improves their lives."The Banger Sisters" has a good premise, that some people never change while others repress their feelings, but it is badly executed. The idea of how people change their behavior when raise a family could be deeply developed based on the past of the two "banger sisters", but the way the forgotten and unknown past of Vinnie is disclosed to her family is absolute shallow and without any purpose. I believe Bob Dolman was lazy or afraid to shift to a profound drama, and preferred the easiest and most superficial way to make the confrontation between two exaggerated sides: the one who lives in the past and the other that does not use her experience to improve her relationship with her daughters and husband. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Doidas Demais" ("Too Crazies")

When fifty-something rock chick Suzette loses her bar job she heads out to Phoenix to beg some money off friend and fellow former groupie Vinnie, despite not having seen her for about 20 years. On her way there, Suzette runs out of cash and offers neurotic coach passenger Harry a lift if he pays for petrol. Once she gets to Phoenix she finds that "Lavinia" is now a respectable member of her community, married to a lawyer and a mother of two teenage girls and the unannounced arrival of Suzette is not something she appreciates. Despite Lavinia's attempts to politely reject Suzette, the latter settles back into the former's life.Even as much as an hour into this film I still hadn't really worked out what it was trying to do or what it was trying to achieve. The narrative was a strange mix of comedy and character drama that didn't really come together that well for the most part and I found this pretty off-putting for the first half. I think the problem was that I was actually interesting in the different paths that the two friends' lives had taken and I liked the contrast and was hoping it would produce a good drama. However after a brief flirtation with something interesting the plot falls easily into the obvious direction of the free-spirited Suzette helping Harry, Suzette and Suzette's family to "lighten up" and be better for it. In doing this it is never better than reasonably amusing and produced a few laughs and a pretty solid atmosphere of returning friendship but unfortunately it doesn't do anything that interesting. I would have liked if it had done something more interesting with the characters and questioned Suzette's life as harshly as it does Vinnie's.Hawn does the best she can with the character and produces a nice simple block but isn't able to search within herself due to the limitations of the script. Sarandon undergoes an obvious transformation but works well with Hawn in the later scenes. It is a shame that such a talented actress isn't allowed more to work with but if you only want the film to be a chick flick comedy then she is good enough. Likewise with Rush, he is better than the bookend of a character that he is given and I'm not sure why he even bothered. Christensen is pretty natural but Amurri is annoying while Thomas is just plain stiff.Overall then this is a so-so film that is amusing but doesn't do anything of interest with it. The very obvious "be true to yourself" plot is rather sullied by the suggestion that Suzette is "right" – a problem that could have been avoided if the script had been braver and placed her equally with Vinnie, instead of having her as the catalyst for everything good happening to the other characters. Amusing fare for some but it is difficult to overlook just how uninspiring and unadventurous it is.