Watching "Riding the Bus with My Sister" was a life-changing experience for me. Before it started I was a dyed-in-the-wool hardcore atheist, but now, having watched it, I believe Satan is real. There's simply no other explanation for the existence of this cinematic turd. Everyone involved should be deeply ashamed. It made me feel sorry for actors in general, because who else would be desperate and needy enough to be seen publicly humiliating themselves like this? People do some strange things for money, but being in this outdoes any stunt Fear Factor challenged its contestants with. "Go on, we dare you to be in a Hallmark TV movie with Rosie O'Donnell playing a retard." "Uh, no thanks." Anjelica Huston proves directorial talent isn't necessarily hereditary, but honestly what could she do with this material (other than the smart thing, which would have been run like hell in the opposite direction)? Rosie O'Donnell is horrible as a rule, but in "Riding the Bus with My Sister" she is the face that launched a thousand nightmares. I am afraid to go to sleep tonight. During one of the many sappy Hallmark commercials peppered throughout the broadcast, a woman visits her newly independent Downs syndrome brother. He has a quiet dignity and speaks well. Rosie O'Donnell, on the other hand, plays an obnoxious braying freak. But she's not alone. It was an interesting choice to include nary a sympathetic or even mildly likable character. Maybe Richard T. Jones's Jesse, but only because I like that actor and felt bad he was in this. Really bad.

And I never thought I'd write these words, but there's actually something worse than the output of Nicholas Sparks. The writing, the acting, the everything is horrendous. A+ for homogeneity, I suppose.

Like many of the other posters here I tuned in for "the wrong reasons." I did not want my heart warmed (thought heartburn was resultant); I wanted laughs. I did get them, but the pain became almost unbearable midway through. Like a marathon of masochism, my wife and I made it all the way to the bitter, completely devoid of revelation end—a true endurance test that left us questioning our sanity. We clearly lack good sense.

And actually, it sort of deserves two ratings: 1 out of 10 in terms of genuine merit, but 10 out of 10 on the "so bad it'll blow your mind" scale.

Can we start taking up a collection to jettison Rosie into space? Please? Side note: 3 cast members of the remake of "Dawn of the Dead" were in this. Go Canada!

Additional side note: having just attended the Diane Arbus retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I wonder if the decision to make Andie MacDowell's character a photographer who gets a solo show featuring shots of her retarded sister was a misguided homage to Arbus and her "Untitled" series of photos of retarded women. Nah, I'm giving credit where credit isn't due.

This could have been such a great movie except for the acting.

Riding the Bus with My Sister is a shameless attempt to put up such an insane sequence of events into a two-hour-plus-commercials time slot to total up to this: Beth (Rosie O'Donnell) is inspiring and courageous and livens up those lives of people around her, and anyone who doesn't see otherwise can shove it. But the opposite is true, particularly due to the performance, though the writing doesn't help. It's not within the power of a filmmaker to make something that doesn't draws the viewer compassionately in, as LONG AS it doesn't try and think the viewers themselves are, to use the word bluntly, retarded. But Angelica Huston, who doesn't seem to do her late-father proud when it comes to taking the director's chair, plops on the sentiment when really what is being revealed is the wildly contrived story of a control freak who's mean and annoying and, at the end of it all, unsympathetic. This might be passing a lot of judgment on O'Donnell's character, who was based on a real person, but it's not without some notice. Beth might be one of the most irritating characters in recent memory, in TV or elsewhere.

This doesn't mean some (totally unintentional) laughs aren't to be had at the expense of the totally dingbat turn from O'Donnell. Maybe it's method, maybe it's just playing it in a very horrific one-note way, but she doesn't do anything to help make this big goose who doesn't seem to notice that the ones who point out that she's loud and obnoxious might be the correct ones. No, the point of view of the filmmakers control that more than anything, wherein it's all either black or white: either people really respect and care for her (the black tae-kwan-do student who has the Isaac Hayes look is never explained really as to why he's with her aside from 'she makes me laugh, I love her, blah blah'),or they're dismayed by her rude quality, like when she's at the cafeteria the bus drivers are at and, after the umpteenth time she's been there, is yelled at by one of the other drivers to get out as it's the BUS DRIVERS section. It would be one thing if the writer tried to make this as some legitimate dramatic scene, but it's all played up like "people just don't understand," which is accentuated by the whole relationship between the two sisters.

Now, it's not that McDowell doesn't try a little with the part, but what is there to be given to her anyway? Her part is meant as a lazy counterpoint to Beth's half-crazy half-stupid mindset. She's a career woman who is a photographer (not very well apparently, even when she makes "arty" photos in black and white),who puts aside her career, and her boyfriend, to stay with Beth after the death of their father. Rainman, however, this surely is not; the story has very little in the way of actual development, except for the most base and totally, despicably predictable points, with O'Donnell grinding on through in a performance that gives cringe-worthy a bad name (or a good name, I guess). Even the flashbacks are ridiculously inept at showing anything aside from 'I didn't really care for my sister then, and I should've, as it took my father about my entire adolescence to move out of the house', in a gray Flags of Our Fathers tint of course. This is all capped off with a final section where Beth tries to contemplate having children. At this point, against my better judgment, I soldiered on to the end, with rests on a shot of Beth, her sister, and the "hot" bus driver all in a goofy pose.

If you have the guts to go through it, just make sure to know there's many "laughs, tears, hugs, etc", complete with the sappiest guitar pluckings this side of Eric Clapton after watching a puppy die, and an atmosphere of total dread where there should be some rays of happiness for these people for the audience. No such luck; it's a Hallmark movie at its most exploitative.