Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content, language and some drug references.
Profanity:
Strong and crude language for a PG13
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking, drug references
Violence/ Scariness:
Comic peril and violence
Diversity Issues:
Diverse characters, a strength of the movie is the positive portrayal of an inter-racial relationship
Date Released to Theaters:
February 8, 2008
“Family is a 24-7 reality check,” explains one of the parade of nightmare relatives. “This is one hell of a family,” says another. These two statements pretty much summarize the movie. And that’s the good news.
Family reunions on screen create immediate identification. We all know what it feels like to come home to our families of origin and discover how quickly those carefully-assembled grown-up personas disappear and those just-below-the-surface rivalries take over. That is why it is fun to see it happen to someone else. This set-up and a talented cast provide the engine that keeps this movie going even when the screenplay lags behind.
Martin Lawrence plays a therapist/author with a successful talk show. He is engaged to Bianca (Joy Bryant) the gorgeous and intensely competitive champion of the reality show “Survivor.” He brings her to meet his family on his first visit home in nine years, for his parents’ 50th anniversary celebration. Although his son Jamaal wanted to be with the family, R.J. had not planned to go – he sent a giant flat-panel TV instead. But Bianca points out that it would be great publicity to film it for his television show, showing the hometown boy made good, surrounding by adoring relatives.
Rated PG-13 for some drug content, suggestive material and language.
Profanity:
Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drug overdose death (offscreen)
Violence/ Scariness:
Some peril
Diversity Issues:
Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:
January 25, 2008
Raya Green (Rutina Wesley) has to go back home because her Caribbean immigrant parents can no longer afford the tuition at her tony private school. They spent that money on drug rehab for Raya’s sister. But they were unable to save her; she died of an overdose. Raya comes back to her old neighborhood to face parents who are devastated and fearful and old friends who are resentful and suspicious. They feel that Raya thinks she is too good for them. Her first reaction is to try to play down her intelligence. When called to the board to solve a quadratic equation, she pretends it is very hard for her. But she does not fool her teacher, who assigns her to tutor the student who has been most hostile to her, Michelle (Tre Armstrong). When the two of them face off against each other, they don’t trade insults or punches — they show off their best dance moves.
Promotion of tolerance and understanding a theme of the performance
Date Released to Theaters:
January 23, 2008
“U2 in 3D” doesn’t just give you the feeling of being at a rock concert. It gives you the feeling of being a rock star. Super-big, super-close, super-clear, and super-charged, it broke the record for the most 3-D cameras used for a single movie and combines footage from seven different performances, giving it a seamless fluidity of camera movement that always feels vital and immediate. No time is wasted backstage, no interviews with fans or roadies. We are onstage from the first song to the encore, inside the performance, and inside the music.
Bono is more often seen as a statesman than a rock star these days, so it is a welcome surprise to see what a mesmerizing performer he is. He and bandmates Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen, Jr. and the Edge are in top form and the concert is everything rock and roll should be — musically, visually, spiritually. This is what they mean when they talk about rocking your world.
Rated PG-13 for some language, sexual humor, and partying
Profanity:
Some crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:
Tense confrontations, comic peril
Diversity Issues:
Diverse characters, some stereotyping
Date Released to Theaters:
September 21, 2007
This updated fairy tale has some clever riffs on “Snow White” but never makes use of the considerable talents of its star, Amanda Bynes.
Copyright Morgan Creek 2007 Sydney (Bynes) is a college freshman who wants to join Kappa, the most exclusive sorority on campus, though she is more comfortable on a construction site than at a cotillion. “You know how people joke about being raised by wolves? I was raised by construction workers,” she explains and we cut to her devoted father (“The Dukes of Hazzard’s” John Schneider) illustrating the facts of life for her with plumbing supplies. When she knew she was dying, Sydney’s mother wrote her a letter, telling her how much she loved being in the sorority. Now Sydney wants to fulfill her mother’s dream.
But Sydney does not meet the standards of the Kappa president, Rachel Witchburn (Sara Paxton). She is not blonde, she is not a size 2, and, worst of all, Sydney fails to recognize Rachel’s supreme domination over just about everything on campus — especially the handsome Prince Matt Long as Tyler Prince, the campus McDreamy.
Rachel boots Sydney out of the sorority in a humiliating public ceremony. There is only one place left on campus that will take her in, the ramshackle house occupied by the campus outcasts. There are seven of them. One has allergies and sneezes a lot. One is an exchange student with jet lag who sleeps all the time. One is bashful. One is grumpy. All are nerdy. And Rachel has a plot to tear their house down so her family can build a shiny new rec center for sorority and fraternity members only.
Echoes of the Snow White story provide the movie’s brightest moments. Rachel checks constantly to make she is still considered the fairest in the land, not in a magic mirror but in the campus “hot or not” website. The poisoned apple? An Apple laptop with an important homework assignment gets infected with a virus. And of course in the big moment Sydney is awakened by a kiss from the Prince.
It is less cute when a nasty trick has the seven dorks naked at a campus party and when they march past Rachel with a mean-spirited “Hi, Ho!” It makes it harder for us to stay on the side of the good guys when they descend to the terminology of the bad guys. And it goes overboard on the geek factor; drawing less from fairy tales than from “Revenge of the Nerd”-style caricatures. For a movie that is supposed to be all about inclusion and respecting the dork within each of us, it has a lot of fun at their expense.
Bynes is captivating despite a role that does not give her much to do but display tomboyish good spirit behind some really unfortunate hair and make-up. She looks trapped in a 1970 Yardley ad, all fake tan, shag haircut, and pale eye shadow. She can make a retort sound spirited, not snappish, as when she tells Rachel that she doesn’t “speak priss.” Her best moments are with Long, who has a great smile and a rare ability to listen to what other performers are saying without thinking he has to be doing something every second he is on screen. Newcomer Jack Carpenter as Sneezy/Lenny brings warmth and humanity to a thinly written role as the most sociable of the dorks.
But director Joe Nussbaum does not trust his performers, the material, or the audience. He keeps the tempo so synthetically sitcom-y you expect to hear a rim shot and a laugh track. Everything is exaggerated. Every joke is an elbow in the ribs. Like Rachel, he is checking his “hotness” every couple of minutes. And like Rachel, his score could use some improvement.
Parents should know that this movie has some vulgar humor and strong language (references to “hos,” b-word), implied nudity, and a drinking game at a party. A strength of the movie is its emphasis on inclusion and the importance of treating diverse people respectfully, and Sydney reaches out to all groups on campus, from the Hassids to the band geeks, cross-dressers, and Goths.
Families who see this movie should talk about when they most felt like outsiders or dorks and what they can do to make sure that people around them feel included and appreciated for who they are.
Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy other takes on classic fairy tales like Ella Enchanted and Shrek. Barbara Stanwyk and Gary Cooper co-starred in an earlier update of Snow White, Ball of Fire.
Rated PG-13 for language, some innuendo and sexuality.
Profanity:
Some strong language (s-word, b-word)
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking (as liberating and empowering), characters get tipsy
Violence/ Scariness:
Comic violence including slaps
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
January 18, 2007
Jane has a special closet in her apartment filled with 27 dresses so ugly that only two things can be true: (1) they were all bridesmaid’s dresses, and that means (2) all 27 brides assured her that they could be shortened and worn again.
Jane (Katherine Heigl of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Knocked Up”) is a natural caretaker. After her mother died when she was a child, she took care of her sister. She has taken care of 27 different brides, helping out with wedding details that have her over-stuffed day-planner bristling with yellow sticky reminders. In her job, she takes care of her boss, George (Edward Burns), the too-good-to-be-true mountain-climbing CEO of an impeccably politically correct corporation. She makes sure he gets his breakfast burrito and picks up his dry cleaning. In her few spare moments, she sighs with love for George or sighs with hope over the weekly write-ups of the most romantic weddings in the Sunday paper. Her dreams are of white dresses, tossed bouquets, and big cakes with lots of icing. Her reality is…dreams.
Just as she decides to let George know how she feels, urged on by her best friend Casey (the marvelous Judy Greer, wasted in an underwritten role as the movie’s designated sleep-around friend), Jane’s globe-trotting model sister Tess (Malin Akerman) arrives and she and George immediately decide to get married, with guess who taking care of all the cake, flower, and decoration details. All of this is so distracting that Jane barely has time to notice the killer smile of Kevin, a cynical reporter (the marvelous James Marsden, almost-wasted in an under-written role that seems left over from an old Clark Gable character). For no reason except the demands of the increasingly flimsy plot, Kevin is required to keep a couple of obvious secrets.
Heigl is the real deal, with girl-you-wish-lived-next-door imperishable but accessible beauty, appealing, endearing, vulnerable, with understated comic timing. Marsden, too, has charm to spare. Both hold our interest and keep us rooting for them even when the script does its best to get in the way. Do we really need yet another scene with characters letting go by getting tipsy and singing 80’s songs? Akerman (“The Heartbreak Kid”), in her second role in five months as a selfish, irresponsible, and all-around nightmare bombshell who impulsively gets engaged, struggles with an impossible task as she tries to be both over-the-top obnoxious and sympathetic at the same time. What does work is Heigl and the dresses and the fact that, like Jane, most of the audience loves to get misty at weddings. Watching this film is like waiting to catch the bride’s bouquet, more anticipation than fulfillment.
“Family is a 24-7 reality check,” explains one of the parade of nightmare relatives. “This is one hell of a family,” says another. These two statements pretty much summarize the movie. And that’s the good news.
and 
. Barbara Stanwyk and Gary Cooper co-starred in an earlier update of Snow White, 
.
Jane has a special closet in her apartment filled with 27 dresses so ugly that only two things can be true: (1) they were all bridesmaid’s dresses, and that means (2) all 27 brides assured her that they could be shortened and worn again.