“Beaches” (** out of four) was a synthetic remake of the 1988 Bette Midler/Barbara Hershey tearjerker about the friendship between two women (Idina Menzel and Nia Long) from childhood to adulthood and the various ups-and-downs in between. Lacks the rich emotion of the original and Menzel and Long lack the strong chemistry of Midler and Hershey. One of the rare movies also that could have been longer because it seems truncated and overly edited at times. A disappointment from director Allison Anders who scored big in the ’90’s with “Gas Food Lodging” and “Sugar Town.”