And more Olsen twins time filling. You know, what I find the best, often only good reason to watch these movies is to marvel at how thoroughly they teach how not to make a movie. Like here, for instance, take the espresso-making scene. There are so many ways to make a clutzy teenage girl trying to get to grips with an espresso machine funny, y’know, see something like Lindsay Lohan with the washing machine in Just My Luck for instance; even Katie Holmes in Pieces of April with the oven. There are no end of sources of inspiration which a movie like this could quite easily just lift verbatim. It’s incredible how unfunny they manage to make such a scene here. Don’t even get me started on those accents. A smattering of points for showing so much of the city, they appear to have actually shot there, but still … eww. Must watch New York Minute (don’t read that review btw, it was evidently written before I succumbed to the cheese that is Paris) again early next year to restore my love for these girls.

Ugh, this is excruciating. And I know, it’s billed as being about Mary-Kate and Ashley getting their driver’s license, and driving doesn’t interest me in the slightest, so I should’ve known. Thing is – I wish this movie was more about the car and the road. It’s a road trip with barely any road in it. I swear, this script – if there even was one – must’ve been written in a night and never altered thereafter. It’s just a random series of events, none of which are remotely interesting. The cover art of this one made it look like one of the few, (moderately) slicker Olsen twins movies, like Passport to Paris, Winning London, New York Minute. Instead, it’s almost unwatchable, packed with those desperate silences which can only have been left in to maintain a feature length. Bland doesn’t even cover it. If you make it through, you won’t believe the sigh of relief you release when you realise yay, there are outtakes at the end!!!!

My first instinct is to not bother saying the first thing that comes into my head about this one – a fake reality show, are you kidding me? Like as if I was expecting some kind of scathing satire on modern mass media culture from the Olsen Twins. Then I realised, no, the criticism still kind of stands. No, of course I don’t expect high art from the Olsen Twins, I’m not dumb. But y’know, considering reality shows are the ultimate fakery to begin with, I don’t care who is involved, a movie that is basically nothing more than a 90 minute fake reality show is still a monumentally insulting waste of time and resources – behind the camera, in front of the camera, and in front of the TV screen. I’d say, oh well, the twins are cute and the soundtrack’s pretty good, but they don’t begin to make up for the awfulness here. Do yourself a big favour and get Series 7 – The Contenders instead. It’s not perfect, but at least it tries.

Addendum: I wrote this before the movie finished, twasn’t particularly hard to see where it was going. But I just wanted to mention the actress Sera Bastian, who wasn’t at all bad compared to everyone else in the abominable display.

Another kind of pointless Olsen Twins movie, but of course they’re getting hormonal here so there’s the Hot Guy^TM element. It’s set in Australia and you get the worst assault of terrible stereotype humour (four girls, count ‘em, called Sheila …) There’s a couple of fleeting laughs (“Why is everybody showing up all of a sudden?” “Hello? Big finale?”), but again, I’d feel a little wrong filling kids’ heads with this kind of thing.

“Do you know on Halloween, goblins roam the land?” Well at least they admit what they look like in this one This movie really has no point whatsoever, the acting is terrible, terrible midi sound module score, you know the deal. I’d feel wrong letting children watch this crap. I think this is probably the worst Olsen Twins I’ve seen so far.

I think my brain may have finally been warped by the Olsen Twins, ‘cos I started out hating this movie but somehow by the end it had won me over. It has a different story than the usual Olsen Twins movie, but it’s still really all about how tough it is to be a girl, lol. I have so many bad things to say about the movie, like how I’d laugh my ass off if it took longer than a day to shoot the whole thing, etc, but I just don’t want to be mean. There’s a really really cute moment at the end when Ashley (or Mary-Kate… who knows?) gets lifted up by the guy she has a crush on after aceing a dive at the swim contest thing, the look on her face is priceless.

This movie must surely be breaking the law somehow given there seems to be no credit to the creators of The Parent Trap, lol. It is absolutely and truly the exact same plot. There are people on the IMDb message boards saying this isn’t so, pointing out that in It Takes Two, the girls are identical strangers, not identical sisters... wow, what a difference…

Kirsty Alley and Steve Guttenberg make a surprisingly cute screen couple, and there are some cute moments, I guess, but give me either Parent Trap anytime while I’ll probably never watch this again. And is it just me or were the Olsen Twins, like, really ugly at this age, lol? They look like gremlins or goblins or something.

There’s a lot about this Olsen Twins movie that makes it better than most, though not quite as polished as New York Minute. Again, the story is very similar, though there does seem to be more reason for their visit to London than rich parents who just want them out of the way: this time it’s a school trip, a model United Nations conference. The main Cute Guy^TM is played by Jesse Spencer, who I instantly recognised from somewhere – he looks a lot like Ryan Philippe, in fact – and a quick look at the IMDb shows he used to play Billy in Neighbours, and was the British rock singer in Uptown Girls. Though his British accent, like all the accents, attitudes, etc in this movie, is highly stylised (this London is the Movie London where everyone either speaks Posh or Cockney, where everyone drinks tea, and nobody in their right mind calls the bathroom anything but “the loo”...), he’s actually a pretty good actor and he makes that tough aspect of all Olsen Twins movies a little easier to sit through.

Also very cool is a small subplot with the characters dubbed “the third wheels” – the minor characters making up the Twins’ school team – and a cute little romance that develops between two of them. They sort of reminded me of Lindsay Lohan’s brilliant friends in Mean Girls. There’s also a very funny scene towards the end that you would expect must have been done before in a more respectable romantic comedy: one Twin is expecting to meet the Cute Guy^TM in front of Buckingham Palace; while standing next to one of the guards she mutters to herself about his not showing, and then walks away; later, the Cute Guy^TM appears next to the same guard, “I know you can’t talk… but did you see this girl…?” and the guard suddenly sharply turns his head with this urgent look in his eyes. The movie has a great soundtrack, too. Not bad at all.