James Hitchcock "The Banger Sisters" attempts to answer the same question as Lawrence Kasdan's "The Big Chill" from 1983, namely whatever happened to all those wild, unconventional free-living, free-loving counter-culturists from the Swinging Sixties when they finally grew up. Kasdan's film took a serious look at a group of hippies-turned-yuppies, although some of them were still trying to hang on to their ideals in the more materialistic eighties. This comedy, set nearly twenty years later, deals with two middle-aged women who in their youth were notorious rock groupies whose sexual exploits earned them the name "the banger sisters". (They are not, in fact, sisters in the literal meaning of the word). Goldie Hawn's Suzette may be middle-aged chronologically, but mentally she will be forever a teenager. (Just like virtually every character Goldie has ever played). It may be 2002, but Suzette is just as wild and unconventional as she was in the sixties. Her old friend Vinnie, however, has renounced her wild past and become a perfect upper-middle- class suburban housewife and mother, the wife of a successful lawyer and aspiring politician. (In Britain "Vinnie", short for Vincent, is almost always a male name, but it would appear that in America it can also be short for Lavinia). When Suzette loses her job in a rather louche LA bar, she decides to travel to Phoenix, Arizona to see her now staid and conventional old friend. Their reunion has a rather surprising effect on Vinnie, who decides to stop being staid and conventional and to revert to her wild old ways. This is supposed to be a film with a moral about the need to be free and authentic and not to conform for the sake of conformity. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work. It might have done if writer/director Bob Dolman had stressed the idealism of the sixties rather than the sexual licence, but it is all too clear that for the young Suzette and Vinnie the decade was less about peace and love than about sex and drugs and rock-and- roll. Vinnie's change from a banger sister to a pillar of bourgeois society, therefore, struck me less as a betrayal of youthful ideals (which is how Dolman invites us to see it) than as part of the inevitable process of growing up. Inevitable, that is, for anyone without a terminally immature personality like Suzette's. Suzette seemed less like a free spirit (which is how Dolman seems to have thought of her) than like mutton dressed as lamb. There is always something pathetic about a woman in her late fifties desperately trying to dress and act like a teenage slut. Although it is now more than a decade since the film was made, Hawn has not appeared in another feature film since. If "The Banger Sisters" does indeed prove to be her last it will perhaps not be the swan-song she might have wished for, but it is hard to envisage her making a comeback. Her original screen persona in the sixties and seventies was that of the loveably sexy girl whose sex appeal owed as much to her kooky, offbeat personality as it did to her looks. She managed to extend her career throughout the eighties and nineties by the simple expedient of reinventing herself as the sexy older woman whose sex appeal owed as much to her personality as it did to her looks, but she could not carry this trick off indefinitely, and by 2002 it was starting to wear a bit thin. Susan Sarandon is good at portraying Vinnie as a stuffy suburbanite, but never manages to suggest that there might be another side to her character, so when Vinnie suddenly decides to emulate Suzette by trying to recapture her youth the effect is both ludicrous and embarrassing. Another thing which does not ring true is the scene where Suzette berates Vinnie for spoiling her two teenage daughters; in reality it is the Suzettes of this world who tend to spoil their children. (The Vinnies of this world are more often guilty of being over-strict with them). The biggest disappointment for me was the performance of Geoffrey Rush, an actor I have greatly admired in other films, especially "Shine" and "The King's Speech". Here he plays Harry, a neurotic writer whom Suzette picks up en route to Phoenix. Actually, "neurotic" seems like an inadequate word to describe Harry; a man who walks round with a gun containing a single bullet, which he says he intends to use to kill his father, who is in fact already dead, clearly has serious mental health issues. Such a character seems out of place in what is otherwise supposed to be a comedy. The suggestion that all his problems can be solved simply by spending a night in bed with Suzette seems, to say the least, inadequate. There is no reason why a successful comedy film could not have been made about two ageing sixties swingers, but with its corny script, its stereotyped characterisation, its below-par acting, the misconceived and unnecessary Harry sub-plot and its phoney attempts at moralising, "The Banger Sisters" falls a long way short of being that film. 4/10

JoeytheBrit 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.

zeemaza I didn't particularly like or dislike this movie. In fact I was lying on my couch and had nothing better to do than to watch it, so I did. It seemed like parts of it were funny and others were boring but there was this one scene towards the end of the movie when Susan Sarandon day dreamed for a few seconds remembering her past and they showed Los Angeles in the sixties that made me so want to go back to that era. It was a simple, plain shot of people walking on the sunset strip in Hollywood and you could tell how much those people loved it. I was very young in the sixties and didn't know what was happening then but now I look at it I know that this must have been the greatest time ever to have experienced in your teens, twenties and early thirties. Everyone looked so ... carefree and happy to be part of that time of experimentation. WOW ... man was it colorful and cool ... anyways, that's all I have to say and I'm sure no one will find this comment useful but if you were growing up in the sixties I envy you!!!

Claudio Carvalho 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")