If seeing a nude Diane Keaton in Something's Gotta Give tested your gag reflex, you might want to skip Calendar Girls.  Instead of one middle-aged woman in her birthday suit, you get 11 in Girls.  And now that all of my male readers have stopped reading, we can proceed with the rest of the review.

Even though Girls is based on a true story, it still comes off as another desperate attempt to replicate the same success enjoyed by The Full Monty. Both films are about an unlikely group of people who take their clothes off for money (remember when those people used to be called whores?).  Both are set in quaint British villages.  Both follow the same cookie-cutter story. But only one is a good film.

Instead of unemployed steel mill workers, Girls offers bored housewives who suffer through local Women's Institute meetings focusing on such exciting subjects as milk, rugs and broccoli.  Annie Clarke (Julie Walters, Harry Potter) is one of them, and when her husband (John Alderton) dies from leukemia, fellow WI member Chris Harper (Helen Mirren, Gosford Park) cooks up one zany idea:  Getting other WI members to pose nude for a calendar, with the proceeds used to purchase a new couch for the family area of the local hospital.

The photography session for the calendar is Girls' best feature, and despite the nudity, I wished it were longer.  Like the real-life calendar, the women's privates are covered up, Austin Powers-style, by various objects, which accounts for the light PG-13 rating (we see more skin than is revealed in the photographs, though).  Girls' first two acts are relatively harmless, but the wheels fall off in the third, in which the calendar becomes a surprise hit, the titular women end up on The Tonight Show, and we all learn a very important lesson about fame.

Girls was directed by Nigel Cole, who also helmed the instantly forgettable Saving Grace.  True story:  I looked online to see what Grace was about and was surprised to find one of my own reviews, despite having no memory of seeing the film.  That's the same kind of empty experience you'll get from Girls. The cardboard cutout characters and typical jokes are aimed toward 50+ women and people who laugh out loud at the hysterically unfunny Will & Grace.  I guess some folks might crow about how empowering Girls is, but is it still empowerment when you have to get naked for people to notice you?

1:48 -

for nudity, some language and drug-related material