Sisters & Friends

The fourth slide-dissolve show in Jocelyn Riley's series about Winnebago women (and the fourteenth entry in the Her Own Words series), Sisters & Friends features three pairs of Winnebago women friends telling stories or simply making idle conversation for five minutes each, while we watch an extremely repetitive series of slide pictures of the women--two pair of whom are photographed in the same setting (on a couch). It's not that the stories are particularly bad, they're simply told in the same mundane style you can eavesdrop on at Denny's for the price of a cup of coffee. For $95, I expect more: a little insight or at least a cute anecdote, especially in a program with limited visual interest. But the one charming recollection--about postcards at Yellowstone accidentally posted in a garbage can instead of a mailbox--trails off into several repetitions of the punch line. I'm not saying that Sisters & Friends needed to be packaged into audience-friendly sound bites to hold my attention; I am saying that simply turning on a microphone and recording people talking is, in and of itself, generally not a sufficient reason to make a film. Not recommended. (R. Pitman)