Calendar Girls

Bomb Rating: 

It seems to me that if you live in a small town in Ireland or England or Wales or Scotland, you're old or fat or ugly, and you've done something in the past decade that involves taking your clothes off, you've got unbelievably high odds of getting your story turned into a small, pointless, Hollywood feel-good movie of the month.

It seems to me that if you live in a small town in Ireland or England or Wales or Scotland, and you're old or fat or ugly, and you've done something in the past decade that involves taking your clothes off, you've got unbelievably high odds of getting your story turned into a small, pointless, Hollywood feel-good movie of the month. Actually, if your little adventure meets all of the previously cited criteria AND you also formed a band in the process, I've got Hollywood producers lined up to put their faces in very close proximity to your genitals!

In the case of this story, Chris (Helen Mirren) and her best friend Annie (Julie Walters) belong to a women's group in their small town and they're sick and tired of all the really boring speakers who present at their meetings. Then Annie's husband, John (John Alderton), gets cancer and dies, leaving Chris and Annie looking for a way to raise money to put a new sofa in the local hospital as a kind of memorial.

So naturally, they do what any 50-year-old, small-town women would do, they get a bunch of their friends together and make a nude calendar. Obviously, since this is based on a true story, if the calendar hadn't been a hit, this never would have been made into a movie, so it's no surprise that the rather boring calendar starts selling like crazy. What is surprising is that the movie drags on beyond the point where the women point fingers at the townsfolk who shook their fingers and their moral indignation at them before the money started rolling in.

Really, when it boils right down to it, this movie focuses on the three words no movie ever should: naked old people.

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