Material Girls (2006) Reviews

• Disappointed

  kayjayt2006-08-21

  I was 100% disappointed with this movie. I am usually a fan of the cheesy girlie movies, and Hilary Duff. Unfortunately the acting in this movie was not there. It seemed more like a movie done between the Duff sisters for fun. You could tell they were acting, not very believable. I'm one of the people who don't normally notice these things too! The plot wasn't that unique and it was so short with nothing really happening, and it was predictable. Yuck! I'm sure they had fun making it, but I didn't have fun watching it. And I don't think anyone else in the theater did either, instead when it FINALLY ended everyone just kinda hurried out of their in silence (nothing good to talk about). See it yourself if you want to, I'm just trying to save you your time.

• Ode to shallowness

  jotix1002008-04-10

  If you are a fan of trendy clothes, superficiality, and emptiness, "Material Girls" is the film for you. But, if on the contrary, you have a mind of your own, and couldn't care less for designer labels, and all the trendiness of a certain group of people, then this is a movie you might not enjoy. Even as the Marchetta girls keep getting poorer by the minute, they seem to have a knack for pulling the right outfits to go with their new impoverished state! One was curious as to what attracted Martha Coolidge, its director, to such paper thin material. She has done better with other movies, so we were surprised to see her at the helm of this project which will not add anything to her resume. As far as the acting goes, this movie will not win any awards, that's for sure. Even Angelica Huston, an actress of excellent taste seems to be asking to herself, "What am I doing in this piece of $#%%^%"!

• Should be rated PG 13

  TJSaffa2006-08-24

  First let me say that I like the Duff sisters, so I was not looking to hate this movie. In fact, we own Hilary's previous movies on DVD and I figured we'd eventually own this one too. Now that I've seen ("wasted money on" is another way to say it) this movie, I can tell you I will not ever buy this and will never watch this again. The only reason I gave this a one instead of a two is that I genuinely like the Duff sisters. I was looking forward to a movie that my daughter would like and I would enjoy, if not just tolerate. I think the sisters should fire their agents, advisers, producers, or whoever put them up to this. It did nothing to enhance their careers. And I'm still not sure who they thought their audience is. Certainly no adults would (or should) choose to see this movie if they weren't going for their daughters, but neither was this movie properly aimed at young girls (the Duffs' main fan base.) As far as the PG rating, I am not a prude - I actually own Mean Girls, and I am fairly liberal about what my children watch (e.g., we love Friends, even though others think the material is not always appropriate for kids) but I squirmed in my seat for the moms that had younger children in the audience, as well as for my 11 year old daughter. Without going into detail - no spoilers - there were blatant references to adultery, gang banging, and sex that I did not think appropriate at all. There was some foul language. There was outright prejudice against all sorts of people. Referencing an earlier review, yes the comment was about "I Love Lucy" and not a Hispanic nanny, but nonetheless, annoying anyway. Most importantly, the movie was mindless, and it didn't have to be. The Duff sisters aside, there were some genuinely talented people in the cast (Anjelica Huston, Maria Conchita Alonso) but the script was so bad that there was no saving this movie. There was a shot at redemption near the end, but the screenwriters blew that too. (How do these things even become movies?) It's almost as if the creators know that this movie won't last but a nano-second in history, as evidenced by the constant mainstream references and advertising plugs. Technically, there was bad continuity (Check out Hilary's hairstyles - in the beginning there is one scene where her french braid magically disappears with a camera angle change; or the lips moving out of sequence with the dialogue)and the jarring special effects editing were distracting and juvenile. Like the characters themselves, this movie is all form with no substance.

• physically painful to endure

  samseescinema2006-08-18

  Material Girls reviewed by Sam Osborn rating: 1 out of 4 There's a moment in Material Girls when the infinitely wise and humble lawyer at the Free Legal Clinic bears down on the equally infinite stupidity of Ava Marchetta (Haylie Duff) and coolly snarls, "you're all frosting, without the cupcake." Granted, this one-liner is of no great wit or intelligence it does hold a kind of all-encompassing truth about Material Girls. Except, in saying Material Girls has as much density as a cupcake's frosting is probably giving the film a world of credit it has no business deserving. The gimmick of Material Girls is in the Duff sisters. Whatever film photographed behind them on the film's posters is immaterial. For all we care, this could be Hong Kong Kung Fu Fury, just as long as it stars the Duff sisters. So in the same way people go to see Snakes on a Plane just to see some actual snakes on an actual plane, people will go see Material Girls only to watch they're adolescent idols bouncing and hopping and giggling about in front of the camera. The quality of the film behind them is irrelevant; just a prettily painted canvas for a blonde hullabaloo. But for all those parents goaded into bringing their ten-year old daughter, I suppose a synopsis is appropriate. Ava and Tanzie Marchetta (Haylie and Hilary Duff) are the faces of Marchetta Facial Products. They're glistening socialites in the vane world inhabited in reality by Paris Hilton and her partying cohorts–minus the sex tapes. They're father, Victor Marchetta, passed away two years earlier and the company will soon be left in the girls' hands. But when a cut-rate newscaster breaks a scandal on Marchetta products causing cancer, the girls' stock plummets and they're left, gasp, without their credit cards. The girls must unite and disprove the accusations in order to save the image of their father. In the process of course, Ava and Tanzie must learn humility and sincerity through the conduit of their loss of funds and fortune. Director Martha Coolidge stumbles in her approach to the material. The film's intention bounces between parody and sentimentality. Sometimes it strives to ooze sympathy for its ditzy protagonists and rolls out the morals by the bushel. But other times, Coolidge ravages her characters with a volley of farcical gags. There's a happy middle-ground between the two intentions that a better director would likely find: where the believably clueless socialites learn to interact with the similarly convincing world of middle-class American society. But Coolidge veers more towards the feel of a sitcom, sans laugh-track. Without it, the jokes fall flat. Neither of the Duffs have a sense of comic timing and the screenplay doesn't bother with helping them along. Material Girls is so woefully unfunny that not even the heaps of twelve-year girls could be heard laughing. Just before the film started, I mistimed my restroom break and admittedly missed the opening minute or two of the movie. I asked my girlfriend, who'd been kind enough to sit through its entirety, what I'd missed afterwards in that opening minute. She explained it to me and I felt a deep sympathy for her. She was subjected to two more minutes of Material Girls, and the thought of any more torture was physically painful to me. That's essentially the effect Material Girls has: it is physically painful to endure. -www.samseescinema.com

• Sickening display of the reason this generation will destroy the world

  thatpalechick2006-12-14

  Hilary Duff and her sister Haylie shine as sparkling young cubic zirconium professional heiresses. They have everything their bleached blonde little hearts could ever want, until OH NOES someone said mean things about their dear dead daddy, who just happened to be a cosmetics mogul in life. So, OH NOES, their feelings are hurt and their stocks go down and all in all they lose about a million bucks out of a hundred million. The people responsible for this piece of garbage obviously realized that not every pre-teen girl who saw this film would be quite as stupid as the characters in it, and therefore would not be inclined to feel any sympathy for the poor little bimbos, and so to make sure that our heart strings were successfully twanged, they burned down the girls' house, had their car stolen, and had all their friends abandon them. Actually, the girls burnt their own house down by setting fire to their makeup, and they gave their car keys to a couple of men who weren't actually valets. Oh, how I sobbed for their loss. I really sympathize more with their friends, fair-weather as they may be, who I saw as very intelligent rats who were finally blessed with an excuse to desert a sinking ship. The girls decide that dear daddy couldn't have done all those mean things he was accused of(creating makeup that causes face-rotting cancer)and set out to prove it. They enlist the help of a hunky young lab technician and a hunky young attorney to clear daddy's name, and set out on a adventure fraught with peril(public transportation)and hardship(having nothing to wear). This movie might have been tolerable, perhaps even enjoyable, if it had not been for one major factor: the characters have no real motive for anything they do. The girls aren't threatened with destitution, they're about to make millions off of the sale of their company. They have all the money they could ever want, but it isn't enough for them. They want it all, and they get it all. They end up right back where they started, with all the money, clothes, friends, makeup, and teacup chihuahuas they weren't actually in any danger of losing. The film tries very, very hard to provide the characters with some deeper motivation. They're not fighting for the spare change they lost over the scandal, no, they're fighting to clear their father's name! They're not throwing a tantrum over hurt feelings, they're standing up for themselves! The movie tries, so very, very hard, to show the girls learning some lesson about humility or responsibility or some other such teen movie drabble, and it fails completely. Both girls get all their money and their boys, and the movie comes across as a taunt to the audience. A sort of "Ha ha, we're so cool. Don't you wish you could be cool like us? Let's go get manicures! And after that, shoes!" message. In the end, this film might entertain Paris Hilton, but the rest of us are left wondering why today's society encourages this type of behavior, and more importantly, why we wasted 97 minutes of our time watching this film.