January 31, 2004
The Banger Sisters
Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon play long-separated friends who were LA rock and roll groupies in the 1960s. Hawn's character is still the free spirit she was back then, but when she loses her bartending job, she drives to Phoenix and discovers that Sarandon's character has become an uptight beige yuppie mom. On the way to Phoenix, Hawn picks up another uptight character, this one a down-on-his-luck screenwriter played with scene-stealing quirkiness by Geoffrey Rush. From this setup the movie becomes a kind of mid-life crisis version of Mary Poppins with Hawn's character cracking Sarandon and Rush each out of their self-made shells. I enjoyed the movie more than I expected to with the exception of the exceedingly ham-handed announcement of the Moral Of The Story in a graduation speech given by one of Sarandon's daughters.