August Rush

First of all, let me just say, I did not enjoy this movie. I thought that having Robin Williams in it might make it better, but I was wrong. To sum up the movie really quickly, I’ll just give a brief description. This film is about a young orphan boy who hears his parents speaking to him through music and the sounds around him. He is a musical prodigy, and encounter different people from all walks of life. The other part of the film is about the boys parents. The mom was a rich young violinist, and the father was a young reckless rocker. They had met and had a one night stand. The rich girl’s father didn’t want them to be together. The girl was hit by a car, and that dad told her that she had lost the baby, when in reality, he had the baby sent to an orphanage. Throughout the movie, you see how music influences all the characters, and finally brings them together in the end.

Okay. Lame. August Rush is rated PG, which I think is pretty appropriate for this film. The two things that would not seem very PG to me are 1)Robin Williams character and 2) the one night stand between the young couple at the beginning of the movie.

1) Robin Williams- He seemed kind of scary! In the movie, he plays this musician who lives in an old theater in New York. He gathers homeless kids who play music, and lets them stay in the theater. He takes all their earnings, and the kids are scared of him. He tried to “snatch” August (the main boy) away, and was just a dishonest and scary man.

2) Promiscuity. Although nothing very graphic is shown in the film, it definitely implies that it’s okay to have premarital sex. Plus, there is some talk of just sleeping around and playing the film.

 All in all, it fits the PG rating, but I gave it two thumbs down.

Blood Diamond and The Bourne Ultimatum

After watching both of these movies I had completely different feelings from both films and the feelings these used to portray what was going on in the film. In Blood Diamond it goes through showing how conflict diamonds are played into the world of industrialized diamonds, and how the government has so much corruption that uses these unknown buyers for these diamonds to help fund these coalition groups that can try to over-throw the government and rule Africa. But in the mean time they show how brutal and violent they are to make people join forces with them so that they can come into power and the way they fund themselves are through these work camps that are used to find diamonds and sell them to outside sources that them sell them to all other clean markets. It also shows how these coalition groups use children from villages that they have pillaged and take these young boys and tell them to either join them or lose a hand so they can’t vote for new laws and policies that the government might put into act. Over-all this movie was an amazing showing of how things work in Africa and how much we really need to do to help stop these wars going on there. The film definitely deserved an R rating for violence and brutal images portrayed throughout the film, but it makes you feel totally for the characters in the movie and the need to help in any way we can.

In the Bourne Ultimatum that was just a fantastic movie. So well done, exciting, and intense but still a great story involved. The rating on this was a solid PG-13 due to violence. But I wonder if this were to be played maybe 20 or 30 years ago what the rating might be then. I would say that this might be rated R because of the violence in it. Because of car chases and gun shots, and the great acts of martial arts and pretty much kicking the crap out of some other guy this could possibly rate R in 1970.

Hoax

I recently watched Hoax, which is rated R. The only things that gave it that rating were a couple f-bombs and a very short glimpse of an older lady’s breast.

I can’t help but wonder why they included the f-word, because it didn’t contribute to the dialogue in any way. It seemed almost out of place given the almost comical situation that the movie is based around. The nudity was also unneeded, it was so short and a little bit surprising because the scene was fine without it. I almost didn’t even notice, I just thought “Is that what I think I just saw?”

Some movies really have no need for these things to advance the plot, so why do writers work it into the script? If the two above details were missing the movie would have been rated pg-13 and nothing would have been lost.