While I found this not nearly as bad as Holiday in the Sun, that might just my personal reaction to it being set in beautiful Paris whereas Holiday was in a cheesy phony beach resort. The storyline is nearly exactly the same, with the Twins latching onto the first Cute Guys that come along (“I can’t understand what he’s saying,” “Duh! Who cares?” and I thought men were supposed to have one-track minds lol… there’s hope though: this movie ends with the Twins shock-horror forgoing the other Cute Guys – yes they have one in every continent, you know – they left back at highschool to do homework instead!) and ditching their careless carer to discover “the real Paris” (uh-oh).

It does have some really cute moments though – even the CGI Louvre scene. The background cast are actually very good, the chef and butler of the Twins’ grandfather (who happens to be the US Ambassador to Paris here), and I loved the character of Jeremy, who chaperones the girls around the city (or is supposed to) while grandpa is busy – the storyline of the girls matchmaking him and a supermodel and waking him up to be more pro-active with his ideas in front of his boss, while for obvious reasons very simple and kid-friendly, is welcome relief from the awful story with the two braindead French guys. Outtakes play through the end credits as usual and they’re, as usual, more fun than the movie itself.

Reasons for watching this movie (in case anyone was wondering why I would do such a thing): I love the Olsen Twins right now, I keep wanting to push New York Minute even higher in my 2004 chart :-p But also I just wanted to see one of their pre-NYM movies to see if I was right when I wrote about the latest being decidedly uncharacteristic of them.

The answer is, New York Minute is a masterpiece in comparison ROFL. Is this an infomercial for the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas (goddammit, I can’t believe I remembered the name of the place they stayed, lol)? It would only be a success if that were its raison-d’être. The twins come across really bad here: one moment in particular sticks in my mind. One of the twins, god knows which, really wants the Hot Guy. They’re at some kind of to-do and she asks her sister, did you see the Hot Guy? And there he suddenly is, on the stage, singing a song, which he dedicates to her. She barely reacts to this, keeping the same standard issue smile on her face as she turns from her sister to the guy singing his heart out for her onstage. It’s creepy. I want Meg Ryan end-of-You’ve-Got-Mail hurt in someone’s eyes when they’re given attention like that!

But there’s no criticism for movies like this. You can’t make movies for toddlers and tweens and then try to explain the real conflicted nature of such emotions. Obviously not one I’ll watch again :-p

I’m one of those people who objects to a hell of a lot of things that are like the Olsen Twins in pop cultural terms (eg, American Idol, Big Brother, Paris Hilton, anything you can find in those magazines that seem to be made for illiterates, I guess), and yet I’ve never truly objected to the Olsen Twins. They’ve never got in my face like the other things, I guess. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I’ve never really seen them gracing talk shows every month, or even seen them on that many magazine covers. Generally, if I see the Olsen Twins, I’m expecting to see them. They’re on their fashion label, they’re in their doll section, they’re in their DVD section. They stick to where they’re meant to be found, and are generally inoffensive.

So, even if I was to hate this movie, it would not be for the reasons that nearly everybody else who hates this movie seem to give, which seems to boil down to a phrase that must have taken them years to assemble, “Olsen Twins [annoyed grunt] suck!”

But I don’t hate this movie. Not one bit. But, equally, let’s not make this about the Twins. It’s clear that this is not the usual Olsen Twins movie, and I think it’s only fair to look at the movie as just any old movie, and talk about it without any further mention of the stars.

From a great manic set of opening titles, this movie is basically a fairly old-fashioned chase across the city of New York when a couple of twins, each with their own agenda for the day, get waylaid by a Chinese piracy operation. Millions of dollars of pirated music are stored on a “chip” (okay, this part really is stupid, but go with it: they’d have been better leaving it as an unidentified Hitchcockian McGuffin…) that accidentally finds its way into one of the twins’ bags. The movie then follows three strands, with the Chinese trying to get their chip back, the girls trying to get to their planned events, and the girls trying to resolve their typical sibling differences. If that’s not enough, there’s a truancy officer (Eugene Levy, is he ever not funny?) on the heels of the “evil” twin, Roxy.

So it borrows from a bunch of movies for its plot, big deal, can anyone say Tarantino? So it gets most of its pace from dizzying MTV editing and pounding hits on the soundtrack, big deal! Personally, I enjoyed the ride of this movie. It keeps moving, which is more than can be said of many, many movies.