Family Film Reviews

EDITORS: The Family Filmgoer has decided not to do longer reviews this week. All the new movies reviewed under "Beyond the Ratings Game" opened last week without any advance screenings.

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Beyond the Ratings Game: Movie Reviews for various ages

-- BETTER FOR KIDS 8 AND OLDER:

"The Longshots" PG -- "The Longshots" is a treat -- humane, humorous, inspiring and well acted. It's based in part on the story of a gifted girl quarterback, Jasmine Plummer, from small-town Illinois, who played in the Pop Warner youth football league. Wonderful teen actress Keke Palmer ("Akeelah and the Bee," PG, 2006) plays Jasmine, and Ice Cube is perfect as her cranky uncle, an unemployed factory worker and former teen football star. While watching his sad, bookish niece after school because her mom works late, he notes that Jasmine has a mean throwing arm. He starts to train her and the local coach (Matt Craven) puts her on the team. As Jasmine starts to win games, she, her uncle, and their struggling little town start to blossom. Despite a few narrative cliches, "The Longshots" is fresh. It includes an adult drinking beer, rare mild profanity and mild sexual innuendo. An adult appears to have a heart attack.

"Star Wars: The Clone Wars" PG -- This computer-animated feature is technically impressive, yet a pale, antiseptic imitation. The Family Filmgoer was bored silly at a showing, but kids seemed rapt. Set between "Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones" (PG, 2002) and "Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" (PG-13, 2005), it still portrays hotheaded Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker (voice of Matt Lanter) as a good guy. His mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor), assigns him a teenage apprentice, Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein). The evil Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) has Jabba the Hutt's (Kevin Michael Richardson) baby son kidnapped. Creatures at the intergalactic cantina sip possibly alcoholic drinks and do mildly suggestive dancing. Jabba's uncle puffs a hookah. Bloodless battles show androids beheaded. Some creatures are monsterish. The Huttlet gets sick.

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-- PG-13s OF VARYING INTENSITY:

"Babylon A.D." (NEW) -- Somewhere in this mess is a thriller, but it got lost in the translation from a French novel and under the direction of Mathieu Kassovitz. The film is in English, but not in any coherent way. Betcha it was re-edited by an unsure studio and dumped into the end-of-summer abyss. Vin Diesel stars as a mercenary named Toorop in this futuristic yarn spun in a war-ravaged but technologically advanced world. Toorop lives in Russia, having lost his U.S. citizenship. He's offered big money by a gangster (French star Gerard Depardieu in heavy disguise) to transport a young woman named Aurora (Melanie Thierry) and her guardian (Michelle Yeoh) from a convent in Central Asia to New York. Aurora is a spiritual prodigy for a new religion. Toorop and the women are pursued by forces who try to kill them or abduct Aurora. The story is never satisfactorily told. There are a number of impressive visuals and Diesel, as usual, is fun to watch, but the film is a train wreck. It contains bone-cracking fights, shootouts, explosions, bombings, one semigraphic wound, some profanity, sexual innuendo, smoking, and the hanging carcass of a dog or wolf. Awfully grim for middle-schoolers.

"Disaster Movie" (NEW) -- The team that made this cheesy spoof of recent Hollywood films has cranked out past satires that also fell flat, such as "Meet the Spartans" (PG-13, 2008 ). These seem to be aimed at teen moviegoers who like to see hit films deconstructed for yucks. They all unfold like a series of overlong "Saturday Night Live" skits. "Disaster Movie" has many targets but few laughs. Matt Lanter plays the hero, who dreams he's in "10,000 B.C." (PG-13, 2008), meets a saber-toothed Amy Winehouse (Nicole Parker), and awakes convinced the world is ending. What follows are sendups of the horror flick "Cloverfield" (PG-13, 2008), "Alvin and the Chipmunks" (PG, 2007), "Sex and the City" (R, 2008), "Enchanted" (PG, 2007), "No Country for Old Men" (R, 2007) and endless others. Crista Flanagan shines alone in her clever take on the glib teen heroine of "Juno" (PG-13, 2007). The movie includes profanity, crass verbal jokes about abortion and child molestation, drinking, drug references, much sexual innuendo, homophobic jokes, implied nudity, severed limbs and toilet humor. Not really for middle-schoolers.

"The House Bunny" -- Mothers of teenage girls may cringe at this saga of a Playboy Bunny who transforms a group of socially inept sorority girls into campus dollies. Yet the movie is too funny, good-natured, evenhanded and smart to feel regressive. Anna Faris creates a great comic character as Shelley, a Bunny forced out of the Playboy Mansion by a rival. Homeless, she trails sorority girls onto a campus and lands a job at the drab Zeta house, where the exaggeratedly frumpy, shy young women could lose their charter for want of pledges. She teaches them how to dress sexily, flirt and get popular. The college girls teach her (she thinks being called "vapid" is a compliment) some book-learning. They all gain a sense of identity. A bit too risque for middle-schoolers, the movie contains a lot of sexual innuendo and bawdy phrases. There is discussion of the need to lose one's virginity, and, of course there are those skimpy clothes. There is a comic nearly-nude scene. One of the sorority girls is pregnant and single. There is rare profanity, toilet humor and brief drinking by an adult.

"Traitor" -- Don Cheadle plays an intriguingly opaque character in this flawed but mostly gripping thriller. As Samir Horn, an American with Middle Eastern roots, Cheadle portrays a man who may be a terrorist, a double-agent, or a rogue operator nursing a grudge that in his mind justifies the bombings he engineers. The movie tells a purposely disjointed narrative that jumps among locales and doles out information in tiny bits. It's clear that writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff intends this style as a metaphor -- intelligence is always incomplete. Guy Pearce is stalwart as the FBI agent on Horn's trail. The bombings (both suicide attacks and larger events) and shootouts are too intense for middle-schoolers, though relatively nongraphic in terms of blood. There is some profanity and smoking. High-schoolers may find "Traitor" engaging despite its flaws.

"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" -- There's no explicit sexuality beyond passionate kisses in this sophisticated romantic comedy by Woody Allen, but the movie is very European-casual in its approach to menages a trois (sexual threesomes), which are strongly implied, but not graphically depicted. So it is more for college-age filmgoers than for high-schoolers. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) are best friends spending a post-college summer in Barcelona. Vicky is engaged and rather prim. Cristina is a romantic adventurer. They meet a charming artist (Javier Bardem) who invites them on a weekend. His volatile estranged wife (Penelope Cruz) turns up, too. Everyone's life is changed. The rating reflects rare profanity, implied sexual situations, a suicide theme, drinking and smoking.

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-- R's:

"College" (NEW) -- Three high-school friends spend a weekend on the campus of a college "party school" to interview for scholarships and see how they like the place. What they actually do is bunk at a boozy frat house full of mean, drunk slackers, who put the high-school boys through a hazing that culminates in a fraternity/sorority orgy. "College," which is atrocious, in case you hadn't guessed yet, aims to be "Superbad" (R, 2007), but only mimics the lewdness and crudeness of that very funny film, and doesn't come near its wit. The trio of teens are played by the reasonably likable Andrew Caldwell, Drake Bell and Kevin Covais. It contains strongly implied and occasionally explicit sexual situations, toplessness and bare backsides, gay and lesbian jokes, sexually explicit dancing, strong profanity and sexual slang, ultra-gross toilet humor, drinking and pot-smoking. Not for under-17s, we warn, perhaps fruitlessly.

"Death Race" -- This 105 minutes of mayhem has a certain fascination -- like gawking at an accident -- but it is problematic fare for action movie fans under 17. In a prison full of convicted murderers, the warden (Joan Allen) lets the inmates soup up old clunkers and race them, adding heavy weaponry to make it lethal. Enter Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), a laid-off steelworker and former racer who was framed for the murder of his wife. "Death Race" is garbage, but Statham's macho act is fun and his pit crew, featuring Ian McShane, adds a bit of wit and humanity. The movie includes a decapitation, beatings, strong profanity, racial and homophobic slurs, awful stereotypes, crude sexual slang and innuendo, a brief nongraphic sexual situation, and smoking.

"Tropic Thunder" -- This bull's-eye spoof of Hollywood, directed and co-written by star Ben Stiller, is wildly funny, but not for under-17s without a parental OK. The dialogue is profane and sexually crude. The film-within-a-film shows grossly bloody fake war wounds. The politically incorrect jokes slam African-Americans, Southeast Asians, Jews, gays and people with cognitive disabilities -- sending up how they're stereotyped in movies. A film company is shooting a war saga in Vietnam. The stars are a fading action hero (Stiller), a comic with a drug habit (Jack Black), and a white Method actor (Robert Downey Jr.) playing an African-American. The director (Steve Coogan) decides to shoot deeper in the jungle for realism, but the armed, heroin-growing thugs they encounter are a bit too real.