In the current popular culture, female friendships - at any age - are generally considered secondary to life's "important" relationships, the romantic bonds between men and women.
Nowhere is this depressing trend more evident than in Hollywood, where story lines putatively about women's friendships tend toward the saccharine (Mona Lisa Smile), the malicious (Mean Girls) or the boy-crazy (take your pick).
Which is why it's such a pleasure (and a relief) to encounter movies such as The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. Like the first Pants movie, it presents its heroines' relationships as complicated, challenging and particularly rewarding, and not simply as a vehicle for finding the perfect boyfriend.
The four stars of Sisterhood are back for this smart, confident second act, based on novels by Anne Brashares. They're reprising their roles as best friends who share a remarkable pair of blue jeans - which, you'll remember, mysteriously transforms to fit each of them whenever she needs its powers most.
Whether the jeans actually perform miracles or simply boost the wearer's self-confidence is a moot point; for teenage girls, the latter is akin to the former.
As the movie opens, we find the friends (Carmen, Bridget, Tibby and Lena) at the end of their first year in college; Carmen (America Ferrera, appealing as always), still the group's emotional center, is looking forward to a summer at home surrounded by her best friends, but the others have different plans. Tibby (the talented Amber Tamblyn) is staying in New York to work on her screenplay, and Lena (Alexis Bledel, formerly of Gilmore Girls) has signed up for summer classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. Meanwhile, Bridget (Gossip Girl Blake Lively) is off to Turkey on an archaeological dig. Stung by the abandonment, Carmen joins a high-profile summer stock theater program in Vermont, where she is quickly recruited from behind the scenes into the spotlight.
Screenwriter Elizabeth Chandler, who also penned the first Sisterhood installment, wisely hews close to the formula that made the previous movie a success, and director Sanaa Hamri (Something New) keeps things moving at a good clip.
This is an ensemble piece, but the young stars are each entrusted with a complete, largely individual story arc, a challenge they handle with various degrees of success: Tamblyn, whose Tibby is sarcastic and very funny, is the clear standout, imbuing her most brittle exchanges with humor and a tentative warmth.
