Sisters was the last film I saw in a theater in 2015. It’s the latest film from the team of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and it’s the funniest I saw last year.
Maura is divorced and is a Nurse. She’s on her own, and she bends over backwards to help everyone but herself. Kate is staying with her daughter Haley (Madison Davenport) in the home of a former employer. Kate can’t hold a job for long, always living on the edge of instability.
Maura has the good relationship with their parents, Bucky and Deana Ellis (James Brolin and Dianne Weist). They tell her that it’s time to move on, so they’ve chosen to sell the family home and move to an Adult Community. They ask her to tell Kate of their plans, but she doesn’t until Kate comes home for a visit. That’s when it slips out that the parents are selling. It’s a total shock to Kate, who is broke and was going to ask to move back home to live there with her daughter. However, Bucky and Deana have already moved out, so they tell the kids to grab what they can and leave the rest.
Kate is livid, but Maura talks her down. Kate insists that they have One Final Party before the sale. As the two of them reconnect, they meet the new buyers, a condescending couple who want to change everything about the home and property. That pushes Maura over the edge, and she agrees to have that one final blowout. The two Ellis sisters are back, baby, and they’re gonna make it a night to remember.
They prep for the party, inviting everyone still in the area, even the annoying ones. All are invited, except for that one Mean Girl that’s Kate’s mortal enemy, Brinda (Maya Rudolph). They end up telling her she’s not invited. Kate gets Maura to invite the new neighbor, James (Ike Barinholtz), to come, and Maura does it, if only to get Kate to be the responsible one this time. Growing up, it was always Maura.
As you’d expect, the party starts off dull, until the music arrives and people start dancing. Their friend Dave (John Leguizamo) also invited Pazuzu (John Cena) to supply the party with recreational pharmaceuticals. He’s a stone-faced straight man, and Kate tries to get him to crack.
As with all the other Party-themed movies (Bachelor Party, House Party I & II and so on), it gets crazier and crazier, worse, and worse. I bet you know the sort of thing that happens next. What I especially appreciated was the epilogue. Most of the films of this type would have ended The Morning After, but Sisters “finishes” the story.
Even though it’s the sort of movie you’ve seen before, there were some additional spins on the same old tropes that actually improved it. The casting is good – there are several of the current cast of Saturday Night Live in the movie. Given their previous movie history together, I’d have expected the role of Maura to have gone to Tina and Kate to Amy, but they switched it around, this time. However, in this story, Kate becomes the responsible one to host the party, so it sort of balances out, if you follow. The other strange bit of casting is with Dianne Weist and James Brolin. They play well together, but what’s strange is that the two of them also star in the new CBS sitcom Life in Pieces as husband and wife. I guess they decided that after making this movie, they work well enough together that they appear as a package in the sitcom I’m presuming that the movie was made before the sitcom was cast. Go figure.
If you hadn’t guessed, I really liked this film, and I do recommend it.