Telling a story that makes an audience feel connected to the characters can be very difficult. But, Ken Kwapis makes it seem like a breeze. All of his movies have been received very well by his audience. Ken Kwapis is not only a movie director, but a television director as well. Kwapis always explores relationships when he directs. Although Ken Kwapis started his career in television, his transition into becoming a film director seems to have gone very smoothly. He still directs episodes from current seasons of shows such as “The Office”. This ability to be able to transfer from television to film shows how he has become a well respected director in Hollywood. It also shows that as a director, you do not have to choose between television and film. Ken Kwapis is a great example of being able to work well in many environments.
As a director, it is extremely important to know the story that is being told by the film. Without knowing the story and whose story it is, it is impossible to be able to connect to the audience that the film is attempting to reach. Ken Kwapis is definitely a romantic comedy director. One particular movie that he has done an extraordinary well at knowing his audience is in his movie based off of a book, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Throughout this movie and through the other romantic comedies that he directs, there tends to be the same type of theme backing it. One theme that seems to occur in his films is a flawed relationship needing perfection.
As a christian, this is an important theme because our relationship with Christ is flawed because of our flawed humanity. Although christians must strive for perfection, they often fall short. It is important for christians to watch films that show flawed relationships because then they are able to recognize themselves in the film and then are able to see how to change in a positive way without hurting those around them. It is also important to see other people making choices and placing themselves into the shoes of someone they know in order to be a better example of Christ's love to those around them.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a movie where Ken Kwapis is brilliantly able to show how well he knows his audience. In the special feature of the movie, he discusses some of the scenes that they had to cut. In the “pizza hangover” scene, he makes a comment about himself. He says, “Women are mysterious to me. You know, I started this picture thinking that I knew something about women, but I don't know, now I'm not so sure.” However, this is not true. In his video commentary about the scenes that are deleted, it is clear he knows women very well. There are two specific deleted scenes that have to do with the character Bridget. The first one is about Bridget playing “chicken” with a car in Mexico. The reason he deleted this scene was because he recognized that this scene is not as powerful because it only shows a physical danger and what the audience really needs to feel is that a girl her age should not be losing her virginity and losing that, especially to her coach, is what is the real danger for this young girl in her attempt to find love. The second deleted scene is one between Bridget and her father. This scene was deleted because Kwapis was able to realize that Bridget does not need to talk about her mother's death to her father because her father is already checked out. It is more important for her to go through her grieving with her friends, the ones who have been there for her. He also felt that “it was better not to resolve the story” and that it was best for there to be loose ends between her and her father.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants came out in June of 2005. It has four strong female leads who alone can capture the audience from the beginning. In the final cut of the movie, Ken Kwapis takes us through a journey that is filled with excitement and tears. He even tells people that "Since [Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants] was released, I can't tell you how many conversations I've had about public displays of emotion in general, and crying at the movies in particular. I've received messages from male friends berating me for creating something that brought them to tears. I've received emails from girls who claim they'd never cried at the movies before Pants. And there are many rave reviews that are quite apologetic in tone. Many journalists have a hard time distinguishing between honest emotion and sentiment. I feel certain the audience knows the difference." There are many reasons that Ken Kwapis received this type of praise for the movie.
At the beginning of the movie, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the audience is introduced to four of the most different girls. Each girl has a unique personality and attitude. Bridget is the gorgeous blonde who lost her mother and her journey is about finding love, but she is looking in all the wrong places. Lena is a girl who feels uncomfortable in her own body and must overcome her own shyness in order to bring two families together. Tibby is left by all of her friends over summer, or so she thought. She must learn that friends can come from any situation and that sometimes the friends that mean the most do not always start out with an instant connection. The fourth girl in our story is Carmen. Being extremely excited to finally be able to spend so much time with her dad, she must realize that things do not always happen the way she hopes, but that does not mean that she needs to cut out those situations.
Because of the way this story is written, it is extremely important for Kwapis to understand the story of each character, as well as how each characters story in relation to the other stories being told. After spending their entire lives together, these four girls must figure out how to live on their own and still keep their friendship strong and be a major part of each other's lives. On their last day together before they all start their own separate summers for the first time, they find a pair of pants that miraculously fits all four of the girls. That night, they make a sisterly pact. They make rules about what they are going to do when they have the pants. During this pact, each of the girls are seen packing and getting ready for the summer apart.
After this, each of the girls start their individual stories. Starting with Lena, we arrive in Greece. Immediately, we are visually brought into the culture and how Lena feels completely awkward in her own body. She continually fidgets and finally falls to the ground. Lena meets a love interest, Costas. How ever there is one problem, Costas' family and Lena's family had a huge disagreement and therefore her grandmother has forbidden the to speak to each other. But, that cannot even stop the connection from growing stronger and the two of them continue to see each other. Yet, she is still afraid of being different than who people expect her to be. Bridget is definitely confident and uses it to to her advantage throughout this movie. She is a beautiful soccer player who has her eye on a guy who is off limits, her coach. Although the attraction is strong between the two, it is against the rules of the camp. Even though she tries to seduce him, he continually stops her, at least in the beginning. Carmen is very self-conscious. She is extremely excited to see her father and cannot wait to spend an entire summer with him, just the two of them. But, she is in for a huge surprise. Her dad has a new family waiting to meet her when they arrive at a place where Carmen realizes her dad is a completely different person than the dad she thought she was going to see. Clearly, the shock of her dad changing so drastically without her knowledge is completely heartbreaking for this young girl. Finally, we see Tibby. She is going to be a complete loner this summer, at least that's how it started. Trying to work to make some extra money, she works at the local convenient store and dreads every moment of it. But, that does not last long, one of her first days she hears something crash, as she sluggishly walks to the aisle it came from she notices a girl has passed out. She calls for help and helps the little girl to get to the ambulance. Soon enough, the young girl that she helped at the store shows up at her door. Her name is Bailey and she knows exactly what she wants, to be Tibby's assistant this summer with her documentary and Tibby does not want to allow it. A few days into Bailey helping Tibby, Tibby finds out that Bailey is dying and they have stopped treatment for Leukemia.
Each of the girls have a breaking point. After sneaking around with Costas for quite sometime, Lena is finally caught. She is an embarrassment to her family by being with Costas. On top of that, Costas is leaving for school within the week and she is losing him forever. She lost her family's respect and the person that she loves. She finally is different then who they thought she was, and no one agrees with her way of life. Bridget finally gets the pants, but unfortunately, she chooses the wrong thing when they come. Searching for love, she sleeps with the soccer coach. Instead of the love that she thought she'd feel, she feels even more alone and even more abandoned. Carmen's breaking point was when she went to try on her bridesmaid dress with her future step-mother and step-sister for her dad's upcoming wedding. She felt like her dad has completely abandoned her for something that he thought was better. With that, she threw a rock at the window and ran. She went back to living with her mom and invites Tibby over. At this point, Tibby and her new found emotions and caring about people's feelings and Carmen ends up yelling at Tibby. Tibby's breaking point is when she actually starts realizing how short life is and how important it is to make your mark before you have to leave, and then watching a girl so much younger than her confronted with it. Then, Bailey goes into the hospital and Tibby tries not to feel anything, but Bailey has already taught her how to feel.
After loosing all hope, Lena stands up for herself. She tells her grandfather that she just wants to have the chance to find love just like he did with her grandmother. At this point, people are able to accept the person she is becoming. Her grandfather agrees with Lena and she runs after Costas. Barely making it before the ship leaves, Lena and Costas catch a glimpse of each other and are wonderfully reunited. As Tibby continues to struggle with her new found friend Bailey who died, she goes through some of her footage and stumbles upon a taping that Bailey had made for her. Bailey reminds Tibby that life is about the little moments become more than the big stuff that hurts. This brief advice completes the change in Tibby's mindset about life. As Kwapis tells us in the deleted scenes, Bridget's closure does not come from her dad understanding, but by her friends being there for her. Although she pushes her dad away even more when she comes home from soccer camp, her friends go to her and she is able to talk about her mom with them. Carmen and Tibby invite them over to Bridget's house because they know she needs them right now. Talking about her mom with the girls who are closest to her is exactly the kind of love she needs, not the love of a man she barely knows. The girls see the strength Bridget has, even when she does not think she has it. Because of this, when she sees the coach again, she is able to understand that it's okay that she made a mistake, and she is able to admit that she was running away from her life, but what she really needed was closure.
The last reunion between the girls truly shows the love that the girls have for each other. When Lena comes home, the three girls surprise Carmen and tell her that she has the courage to show up to her father's wedding. At this point the true bonds of sisterhood shine through. They instate a rule to help the sister who is in need at the time. With Carmen able to stand at her father's wedding with the rest of the family, the final sister is able to overcome her struggle. The closing scene of the four girls sitting at the table at the end of the summer where everything is just like it was at the beginning of the summer, except that they have all grown.
The beauty of the pants is that they represent more than just an article of clothing, but an opportunity where one thing can bring people closer by sharing it when they are not together. It is important to recognize that it was not the pants that really held everything together, but they represent the fact that it is the friendship and the bonds that the four girls have shared over the course of their lifetime that even though there were huge life changing events that happened this summer, the bond they share was enough to keep them together.
One of the aspects that made this film great was the transitions. The transitions in this type of a film is crucial to the entirety of the film. If the audience was not able to understand where they were being taken to they could easily get lost in the different story lines. However, Kwapis brilliantly took the transitions between locations and connected them visually so that the stories made sense in the whole film as well as in their individuality. Shots that transferred us from one location to another allowed the audience to cut to locations without the bore of using fades constantly.
The beauty of femininity in this film is almost overpowering. Each of the four girls is uniquely beautiful. Unlike traditional beauty, the beauty of the girls in this film make it relate-able for any women to be able to watch and connect with the girls. Even though Kwapis claimed to not understand women as much as he thought going into this film, the relationship between the sisters was so powerful that every women can relate to it.
Overall, this movie hits all the aspects that Ken Kwapis tends to lean towards in his movies, romantic comedies. He understands his story and the most effective way of telling it. He knows exactly what he is filming and why each scene is there. He has a romance in Greece which he portrays beautifully and a father and daughter being reunited and the struggles a daughter must go through when she finds how her dad has a new family. And just in case that did not hit the spot, he is able to portray a girl who has lost her mom and is yearning for love, and starts to look for it in all the wrong places. Still, there is one more story. The one girl who will be staying at home while everyone else goes on an adventure, goes on an adventure right in her own town. As she befriends a young girl that is dying from leukemia we are able to show a deep friendship that touched everyone's lives. While keeping all four stories unique, he was able to fit them perfectly together into a wonderful work of art so that all the story transitions are blended together so well, the audience is easily able to follow the story. Because Ken Kwapis knew exactly what he was saying, instead of an audience feeling confused and lost throughout the movie, he had the exact opposite effect. People were so swept up into the movie, that they felt the emotions that each individual in the movie was feeling as well.
This film was one of his first feature films. Although Ken Kwapis started his career in Television, his transition into a film director seems to have gone very smoothly. He still directs episodes from current seasons of shows such as “The Office”. This ability to be able to transfer from television to film shows how he has become a well respected director in Hollywood. It also shows that as a director, you do not have to choose between television and film. Ken Kwapis is a great example of being able to work well in many environments.
In Ken Kwapis' movies, there always is a couple that needs to overcome something in order to find itself. For example, in License to Wed, the main couple needs to get through with the marriage prep course and understand each other better. Kwapis directed this movie after the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. This story is about Ben and Sadie who are in love and want to get married. However, in order to get married in the church that Sadie wants to get married in, they must go through marriage preparation classes. Because their wedding is so close to when they went to the minister, they must complete the course in three weeks. Although there seems to be nothing to it at first, these two lovers figure out that there is much more to a marriage than just love. They must be willing to sacrifice and accept each other and they must trust each other completely.
Ben finds this marriage preparation to be burdensome. He knows that Sadie completely trusts the minister and therefore feels like he must make the minister look bad so that Sadie does not rely on the ministers opinion so much. Throughout the marriage preparations, Sadie feels like she is trying so much harder then Ben. At one point she even goes and looks at the vows that Ben is supposed to be writing. To her horror, she finds nothing but a drawing. Ben ends up making Sadie disappointed in him and the day before the wedding at the wedding rehearsal, they break up because the last straw for Sadie is that Ben tried to disprove the minister's knowledge.
At this point, Sadie goes off to where they were supposed to be having their honeymoon with her family and Ben stays home and goes to a bar. This is where Ben realizes how much he needs Sadie and how much he truly cares for her. He flies to their honeymoon location and tries to get in contact with her but she refuses. Finally, he writes out beautiful wedding vows in the sand underneath her her hotel window. As they are reunited, they get married right there on the beach by Stacie's minister.
Just like in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, this is a comedic way of presenting how relationships are maintained and that even though Christians strive to be perfect, everyone is imperfect and it is important to realize that even though each person has their own flaws, it is important to understand where the person is coming from because it will often explain the way they are acting towards others.
Because of License to Wed and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, it is not a shock that after these making two movies, he made He's Just Not That Into You. In this movie, he recognizes anything and everything that can go wrong with couples and people and all of the characters have a comedic romantic problem to get over by the end of the movie.
One major similarity between Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and He's Just Not That Into You is that they are both based off of books. The challenge with making a movie based off of a book is that there is already and audience that expects a certain experience and they have certain expectations for how the characters look, sound, and act. However, very few people disagree with how Kwapis takes these stories and adapts them to the screen. This further proves that Kwapis completely understands the story he is trying to tell and the audience he is trying to reach throughout the stories.
As a television director, he also tends to direct episodes with similar themes to those of his movies. In addition to directing the Pilot episode to the hit show “The Office”, he also directed other episodes such as “The Job” and “Company Picnic”. Both of these episodes and the other episodes that he has directed all have the romantic comedic aspect to the main storyline of the episode. Similarly, he directed many episodes from the hit show, “Malcolm in the Middle” that had a similarly themed storyline in the episode.
As a christian, Ken Kwapis is a good example of how to handle delicate situations. The stories that he tells are clear and complete. The storylines are concise and easy to follow. They deal with important moral issues in a way that allows the audience to think without being preachy or overly “Christian.” Because of this, Kwapis does not narrow the audience down to “Christians only.”
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