In Her Shoes

What I find interesting about this film is how precisely opposite it is to Wedding Crashers, and not just because one is a chick flick and the other is a buddy movie. Here I found the first 20 minutes rather shticky and off-putting, and I was on the verge of cutting it off (except that I am a Toni Collette fan from way back -- e.g. Muriel’s Wedding), but the film got more involving as it went along, though it went on too long and the resolution was a little too pat. High-quality, against-type direction from Curtis Hanson made the proceedings more appealing and elicited pleasingly subtle performances from Cameron Diaz and Shirley Maclaine, as Toni’s antithetical sister and long-lost grandmother respectively. I will date myself here by remembering when Shirley (Irma La Douce) was for a teenage boy the heart (and other organ) throb that Cameron is today. Okay, the message that the body and the brain need to learn from each other is not exactly novel, nor that sisterhood is powerful, but both the sentiment and humor of this story reached me. I find it intriguing that the critic with whom I agree most often, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com, had exactly opposite reactions to this and Wedding Crashers -- must be an anti-gender thing. (2005, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-60, RT-74.)