How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer

Powerful insights overcome occasionally tedious pacing
***1/2

The Garcia girls consist of women from three successive generations: Dona Genoveva (Lucy Gallardo), the septuagenarian matriarch of the clan; Lolita (Elizabeth Pena), her stressed-out single-mother daughter; and Blanca (America Ferrera), her just-beginning-to-learn-about-life teenaged granddaughter. As the middle person in the hierarchy, Lolita has her hands full dealing with not only her own issues of a middle-aged divorcee struggling to make something of her own life, but those of an aging mother who's suddenly decided she wants to learn how to drive and to become romantically involved with the family gardener, and of a daughter who`s just beginning to learn about boys and the strange impulses and yearnings that are suddenly pouring forth from her rapidly changing body.

At its core, "How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer" shows how the problems of sex, love and relationships cut across all generational lines. Genoveva, for instance, is every bit as...

Time and Love
How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer (2005) Elizabeth Peña, America Ferrera
Rated R.
Another basically unknown movie.
This Indy film by a new woman director, is a slice of life taking place in a parched and dust bound piss-ant of a border town in Arizona.
This town can be best described as a derelict vehicle set on blocks in the desert and waiting to rust away as the years roll on by, without anyone ever noticing.
No where to go.
Nothin' to do.
A dirt road to nowhere in particular so why is there even a road?
Towns like this offer a corner video store as it's only breath of life to all its residents. That and the local laundromat hangout.
Three generations of Hispanic women: mom, daughter and grandma, begin to collide when old and new cultures cross swords as they all decide to break out of their monotony.
Their trials lead them to many experiences and revelations.
The characters and their lives are oddly...

Good Ideas Don't Always Make Great Entertainment
Three generations of Hispanic women (Grandmother, mother and daughter) struggle through their relationships with men and sexual encounters in a small town. The grandmother, having lost her husband a long time ago craves the attention of her gardener who helps her learn to drive. The mother, divorced, struggles with her feelings toward men and how intimate and involved she dares to get (and with whom). The daughter is just starting out with her sexual feelings and has her first sexual union. The ideas presented here seem to transcend race or culture and could apply fully to any women; not just Hispanic women. The movie is bold and explores territory that makes one think about how men and women relate to each other sexually in a way that not many movies do. Sex is so casual in many movies; here it is taken seriously and not lightly. I would say it was thoughtful and thought-provoking movie. A couple of the scenes seemed unnecessarily long and a little uncomfortable to watch (the...

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