The Banger Sisters (2002)

Waste of time

A lot of fun.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

A movie that in a great and funny way brings us the message that it is always better to be true to oneself.I really enjoyed the movie. I like friends/bro kind of comedies and it was great to see a similar topic but with females over 50 in the main characters.The two were best friends in their youth and famous groupies. Then life has taken them apart and Suzette stayed who she was while Lavinia became an uptight lawyer's wife. When they meet again they get Lavinia back to what she enjoyed.I like the characters. Suzette is still a party girl but she is different from the young ones. One can see that she has experience in life and learned a lot from it. She is also a bit more thoughtful than one would imagine somebody like this to be towards the weird guy she picks up on the road or towards her friend. And Goldie Hawn does a great job. I am actually surprised this was her last big role, so she didn't make a movie over 12 years now! How Sad. Susan Sarandon also does a good job with Lavinia. Sure, the movie is too short to make her transition more complex, but she does the best with it. One believes her in all her moments.Besides the main characters the movie is also good with the supporting ones. Harry, greatly played by Geoffrey Rush, is a very unique and interesting character. His story adds a lot to the movie and one kind of wishes it was longer to see more. It was also fun to see Eva Amuri, Sarandon's daughter, playing her daughter here as well.All in all a great movie. It deserves a greater rating than it got here. A fun story, great acting, fun jokes and special moments. There should be more of those.

This is a terrible,horrible movie,unless one agrees with its basic premise that sluts are cool,even at 50. Goldie and Sarandon play a couple 50 year-olds who in their youth were rock-groupies. We enter the story when they are middle-aged,Goldie is till going on as she was at 20,and Sarandon changed to a(fake)conservative woman,who brings up a family.The key word here is FAKE,because Satrandon is NOT presented as a normal 50 year-old who just grew-up but as a woman who secretly longs for her wild youth. The script written by probably some woman who never had sex and strongly regrets her ways,is a glorification of the life of a slut,not only at youth but even at middle-age.Goldies character is presented as a"cool" person,and the actress,in a horrible performance just walks around with the attitude of a rock-star,understandably because she once slept with some of them. The movie is of course laughable but because its not presented as a satire but even has a moral message!!!!,i have to say it is nauseating.Unless you think that the message,is OK,and that middle-aged women should teach their daughters that they should be sluts and whores and its OK,as long as they don't try to hide it,which that and only that is the ultimate sin. Maybe the worse movie i have ever seen.Unfortunately i cant rate it lower than 1,there is no 0 in IMDb rating.

Ageing but still cute rock chick Suzette (Goldie Hawn – looking worryingly hot for a woman approaching 60) gets an attack of nostalgia when she loses her job from the bar at which she has worked for twenty-odd years and gets a hankering to see her old friend, Vinnie (Susan Sarandon). Back in the 60s/70s, Suzette and Vinnie were the Banger Sisters, groupies supreme, bedding any rock star they came across and taking photos of each conquest's proud member (the sisters are based on a pair of real-life groupies known as the Plaster-casters – figure it out). On the road to Phoenix, Suzette picks up Harry Plummer (Geoffrey Rush), a disturbed failed writer who is planning to shoot his father. Once in Phoenix, Suzette discovers that Vinnie, now known as Lavinia, has moved on with her life, and is now the staid wife of a man with political ambitions, and mother to two less than perfect teenage daughters.The Banger Sisters is actually two stories combined into one. First there is Suzette's story and that of her relationship with the severely repressed Harry Plummer, and then there is the main theme of the film, which is the relationship between the 'sisters' and what it says about being true to one's real nature. It looks at one point, in the first scene that all three principals share, as if writer/director Bob Dolman is going to find a way to combine these two stories into one theme, but he fails to do so and, for the rest of the movie, the separate strands impose on each other like neighbours borrowing sugar. Hawn is the constant in both tales. Thankfully, she has enough presence to fulfil her role, but the chemistry she develops with Sarandon far outshines anything she achieves with Rush. This is a shame, because it is this side of the story that is the more interesting and less touched with the dreaded sentimentality that pervades the majority of American comedies. Rush's is a character more in need of salvation than Sarandon's who – let's face it – is leading the same kind of life as 90% of middle-class wives – and is definitely in need of more screen time to obtain that salvation convincingly. Sarandon's transformation, too, is too sudden: one minute she's having conniptions at having discovered her daughter having sex in the family pool, the next she's swigging wine from the bottle and smoking a joint.The Banger Sisters, then, is a formulaic movie – ironic, considering its message is to refuse to be bound by formula – which is only partially redeemed by the solid performances from its talented cast, of whom Hawn is by far the best. She looks closer to forty than sixty – although you won't find too many close-ups of her these days – and still manages to portray cute and perky without becoming embarrassing. The interplay between her and Rush is enjoyable, but could have been much better given the potential of their character's situation, and Rush, you suspect, is never in any doubt that his role is intended merely as a foil for Miss Hawn's.Movies like this never win any meaningful rewards, but then they never set out to. This one will win itself a place on the DVD shelves of a certain kind of viewer, the type who never tires of fuzzy soft-focus pleas to be true to oneself and who seeks no other deeper meaning in their movies. All others should gain at least some enjoyment from the scenario before it succumbs to genre stereotype in order to wrap things nicely in its relatively short running time.

Goldie Hawn has played lovable and honest airheads (CACTUS FLOWERS), able bank robbery assistants ("$"), spoiled brats who find themselves by army service (PRIVATE BENJAMIN), spoiled millionaires who find themselves by amnesia (OVERBOARD), troubled movie stars that gets even - with the help of their friends - on rotten husbands (FIRST WIVES CLUB), and even selfish women who end up gaining immortality - but being locked in a permanent hell with an equally selfish, immortal, female enemy (DEATH BECOMES HER). Most of her films and performances are really good - and she has been one of the few (very few) "Blond Bombshells" with lasting movie power. Personally I think she knows how to choose most of her properties, and that helps. THE BANGER SISTERS is a sensible variant on THELMA AND LOUIS, which Hawn's co-star, Susan Sarandon, made with Geena Davis years earlier. Unlike that classic which ended in a suicidal drive off a cliff by the heroines, this one confronts the issues of individuality reemerging with less destruction as a result. Suzette (Hawn) has just been fired from her job, and is driving in the southwest without any really clear plan for future action. She stops in the desert and picks up Harry Plummer (Geoffrey Rush - with a nicely done American accent in this film). Plummer is a writer at beam's end - suffering numerous emotional quirks and a current writer's block, all of which he blames on his father. It seems nothing Harry ever did pleased his father. He is going to Phoenix, Arizona to confront the old man. Suzette drives him to Phoenix, and after they separate she goes to look up her oldest friend "Vinnie" (short for Lavinia - Sarandon). She finds her friend in an up-scale section of Phoenix, and watches her friend kiss her daughter (older daughter Hannah - Ericka Christensen) good night as the daughter goes off to her high school graduation prom. Sarandon is certainly dressed like a social matron type now - understandably as we later learn her husband (Raymond Kingsley - Robin Thomas) is a highly successful lawyer with political aspirations. But this is unsettling to Suzette - when she knew Vinnie they were palling around Los Angeles twenty years later, and having a raucous old time.Suzette returns to the hotel that Harry is at, and (despite his protests) camps down there in a spare room. Harry is too neurotic to take advantage of Suzette's free-spirit offer of sex, but he does allow her to stay. It's lucky she does - Hannah and her fellow students are at their prom in the hotel, and Hannah had taken some bad "acid" and gotten sick. Suzette steps in to help Hannah with this problem, and then drives her back to her home. And in doing so she confronts Vinnie.Vinnie recognizes Suzette - and totally misunderstands her being there. She thinks that Suzette is there to get money. Quite hurt at this (and an offer to give her $5,000.00), Suzette explains she was just driving Hannah home and leaves. Vinnie learns from Hannah that she took drugs and Suzette helped her. Later that morning the still stiff-necked Vinnie visits Suzette in Harry's hotel room and apologizes (stiffly) and offers to take her to lunch the next day. Suzette accepts.Two plots slowly evolve here. Harry's neuroses towards women crumble as he gets to know what Suzette is like - he even keeps a hot bath for her while she is out driving Hannah back home. Suzette and Vinnie get to know each other and the divide between them as Suzette watches how Vinnie is a control freak over Hannah's relationship with a boyfriend, and on trying to build-up the self-esteem of younger daughter Ginger (Eva Amurri) despite the latter's bratty crying and selfishness. Vinnie notes how all her clothes "are beige" while Suzette looks like a walking flower (because of her free and easy lifestyle).While Suzette slowly gets Harry to emerge from his neurotic cocoon (and even start typing up a literary storm while she is out), she also reawakens long dormant freedoms that Vinnie clamped down on in her rise as Raymond's wife. She ditches her own smart uppity wardrobe and wears a set of Suzette's clothes (in fact it helps matters here that Sarandon, like Hawn, has a really nice figure - they both have very tight pants on, and look quite hot together). Vinnie reveals a treasure trove in her basement - a small box of "special photos" she and Suzette took back when of their favorite musicians*). She even starts smoking (with Suzette) a marijuana cigarette, They even go out to a bar to dance (it takes awhile for Vinnie to get into the swing here). (*The photos are very special - and of special equipment.)But how far can this release go? It upsets Raymond, Hannah, and Ginger to see "Mom" acting so odd. And the constant sight of Vinnie with her family reminds free spirit Suzette of her sacrifice - similar to that of Anne Bancroft vis-a-vis Shirley MacLaine in THE TURNING POINT - of doing what she wanted, and failing to get a family in the process.Also how far will things succeed for Harry? He too is being freed, but he keeps sliding when he meets with some nasty set-back. And there is still the problem of settling the issue with his Dad.THE BANGER SISTERS was not a box office dud, but it never got the notice from critics that were given in 2002 to other films. It is a fun and thoughtful film of how our wild and conservative sides have to make time for each other for us to be totally happy individuals.