It\'s like these women are aliens

This film is so silly, so self-indulgently cutesy that almost from the opening scene I was retreating.

Callie Khouri won an Oscar for her screenplay of Thelma and Louise way back in 1991. Her first film as director is also about women, it`s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Vivi, Ellen Burstyn, Teensy, Fionnula Flanagan, Necie, Shirley Knight and Caro, Maggie Smith, share a blood bond they established over sixty years ago in a dark forest in the middle of the night, they are the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. So when Vivi has a falling out of serious proportions with her daughter Sidda, Sandra Bullock who`s become a famous playwright in New York the sisterhood gets to work. Teensy, Necie and Caro fly to the big apple, sedate Sidda and kidnap her to a cute little cottage where they forcefeed her stories of the sisterhood and Vivi so she`ll understand and forgive her mother. This film is so silly, so self-indulgently cutesy that almost from the opening scene I was retreating. When the opening scene is re-enacted at the end of the film I physically cringed. Ripe is the only word to describe the performances of the aging sisterhood and Sandra Bullock does, Well, she does Sandra Bullock. Ashley Judd manages to wring a modicum of dignity out of her appearance as the younger Vivi. James Garner as Vivi`s poor husband and Angus MacFadyen with a very strange Irish accent as Sidda`s intended are marginalised and ineffectual as characters. In fact none of the characters are even likeable. The design of the film, the direction do nothing to minimise the sodden nature of the screenplay which Khouri adapted from two of Rebecca Wells novels.