Dreadfully Boring

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

There isn't much here that is new. We have a woman (who isn't a bad woman) invading the space of a couple of teenagers who are out to keep her away from their father. Hailey Mills plays both the girls (twins) with their tight curly blonde hair. They can barely carry a tune but they sing anyway, and that song has become part of the eternal movie culture. What happens is a series of tricks pulled on the unsuspecting woman (who really has no sense of humor so makes a good foil) to show that she and the dad have nothing in common. Some of what they do is downright cruel and mean spirited. I guess we enjoy it because we want the father to be happy too. Just a bit of fluff from the Disney studios.

The movie The Parent Trap starts off with your main characters Susan Evers and Sharon McKendrick. You first meet the two girls at a summer camp. From the most they set eyes on each other they hate each other, it might have been because they look so much alike. After pulling several pranks on each other the girls end up stuck in a cabin together! One stormy day they start to talk to each other and find out that Sharon only has a Mom and Susan only has a Dad! They put it together that they are twin sisters! They decide to switch lives so they can meet there other parent. They then try and pull there parents back together.The Parent Trap was a very family friendly movie. There were several times to laugh during the movie, but it definitely had a deeper meaning. This is definitely a movie to watch with the whole family. It was a very interesting story, that kept you not wanting to see it end. It is nice to know that they are bringing their family back together. It really shows the importance of having families together helping each other. I would definitely give this movie a good rating.

Questionable Disney film with Hayley Mills playing 2 roles; twins whose existence was kept from the other due to an improbable and cold-hearted decision by their selfish, divorced parents played by a lovely Maureen O'Hara and a tubby Brian Keith who's notably lacking in warmth. Mills doesn't make the twins distinctive though the special effects are fine and unobtrusive. The big problem with the film is that the adults are childish and unappealing and Keith and O' Hara don't belong together and what brought them together in the first place remains a mystery. Pity Joanna Barnes who was so good in Auntie Mame (1958), she has a thankless role and has been prematurely aged by hairstyle, make-up and photography. The supporting cast made up of familiar faces is dull and David Swift's direction of this big screen sitcom is anything but swift.

No doubt as a penance for releasing scores of animated films without cogent family units, Disney released The Parent Trap; a Hayley Mills starring, anti-divorce film that had to have felt dated on arrival. In it, a set of estranged identical twins meet by sheer happenstance at camp, trade places, and attempt to bring their divorced parents back together again. The plot immediately appealed to me, even though I had seen the Lindsay Lohan remake. It's a story about the difficulties of preserving the family unit, the unfairness of divorce on young children and the implications of love when faced with the practicalities of life. So naturally Disney sidesteps such themes to make a film as fluffy and unnecessary as a feather boa.Okay, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little. The young Hayley Mills who had just started her Disney movie blitz is at her best as the likable twins Susan and Sharon. Both characters have personalities that are just developed enough to tell them apart but in case its too subtle one has a bad case of Long Island lockjaw. Their hijinks are fun, their humor agreeable and the end result is one of the more charming performances to come from a child actor.I'm actually quite concerned for these kids who have to deal with such narcissistic parents. Sure Disney glosses over the reasons why they got divorced in the first place but its easy to see their personalities are just too self-absorbed to be loving partners...or parents. If you're the proud parents of twins or triplets or sextuplets, you'd be able to narrow in on who's Justin and Dustin wouldn't you? That puzzle would be even less difficult if one of them had been a stranger to you for thirteen or so years but this all seems to be above their heads. Its only when one of the twins finally blurts out the truth that the families discover there's something rotten in the state of Massachusetts.The parents get even worse when they reunite and start exchanging rancorous chit-chat. The father (Brian Keith) you see is about to marry a much younger gold digger who, of course, exemplifies the evil stepmother trope we've all come to expect. So it only makes sense that the man's ex-wife (Maureen O'Hara) takes a trip to the coast, unannounced, totting one of two Machiavellian moppets, making catty comments, and dressing in the man's bathrobe. She then prances around the grounds while he's entertaining in a twisted game of hide-and-seek. Once they actually meet up, they of course argue until she literally punches him in the face in front of their kids! By that point, the couple was one mimosa away from "Thunderdome".If either of them were smart they'd get a restraining order against each other and shuttle both kids back and forth between California and Massachusetts. Not an idyllic solution, but its better than living with "The War of the Roses" (1988) 24/7. But alas they do stick it out together in the end because everything is supposed to be cheery, rosy and bright. It's a Disney movie after all; there are no tears in Disney movies! I just fear that kids with divorced parents will see this movie and want to imitate it which is kind of sad when you think about it. Its a hard lesson to learn kids, but sometimes a divorced household is better than one where one parent's in the morgue and the other in jail.http://theyservepopcorninhell.blogspot.com/