BRUCE ALMIGHTY
RATING: PG-13
STARRING: Jim Carrey, Jennifer Aniston, Morgan Freeman, and Lisa Ann Walter
DIRECTOR: Tom Shadyac
PRODUCERS: Michael Bostick, James D. Bruaker and Jim Carrey
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum
WRITERS: Steven Koren and Mark O’Keefe
DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures
GENRE: Comedy/Drama
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Teenagers and adults
SUMMARY: In Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey is Bruce, a frustrated man who meets God face-to-face and gets the rare opportunity to try His job for a season. Although it contains some unorthodox theology, gritty language, sexual elements and vulgarity, the movie is nevertheless a provocative work that may spark interest in the unsaved about the ways of the True Almighty.
In Bruce Almighty, Bruce hates his anchorman job and his co-worker, hates the traffic, hates his car, and hates the silly little projects his girlfriend Grace wants him to do. He rails that God could fix his life but will not. On a particularly bad day, Bruce holds some prayer beads and cries out to God for a miracle. He gets to meet God face to face, and God offers Bruce His job. The nonstop power and pleasure are great until he starts hearing thousands of prayers! He answers "yes" to everything, but this ends in disaster. Then, he loses his girlfriend and his job in the process! Will the real God step in and give Bruce another big lesson?
CONTENT: Biblical worldview portraying some of God’s characteristics and many of man’s ignorant, humorous ways, as well as many positive Christian references and symbolic biblical portrayals such as golden calf, parting of the Red Sea, etc.; relatively strong language with 18 obscenities, 11 profanities, and many rude gestures; allusion to sex with live-in girlfriend; back side of photo portrays subtle outline of naked woman.
DOWN WITH LOVE
RATING: PG-13
STARRING: Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Paulson, and Tony Randall
DIRECTOR: Peyton Reed
PRODUCERS: Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Paddy Cullen and Arnon Milchan
WRITERS: Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake
DISTRIBUTOR: 20th Century Fox
GENRE: Romantic Comedy
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Older teenagers and adults
SUMMARY: In Down With Love, it’s New York City in 1963, and love is blooming between a journalist playboy and a feminist advice columnist who thinks he’s a lovable astronaut. Despite some clever and campy features, the movie leaves audiences with a somewhat confused worldview combining traditionalism and feminism, with scenes full of sexual innuendoes played for laughs.
Down With Love stars Renee Zellweger who plays Barbara Novak, a feminist author who arrives in New York City to promote her new book, where she tells women to focus on their careers and exist without love, because love is confining and repressive. The answer, she says, is to learn to live like men, having meaningless sexual encounters while consuming vast quantities of chocolate.
CONTENT: Predominantly feministic worldview with sexual innuendo, extreme feminism, and homosexual humor underlying many scenes with one slur on Christians and one pagan portrayal of Buddha, a philosopher who has become a religious figure; light offensive language with one or two light obscenities; many allusions to sex, sometimes campy, with protagonist being major playboy with apartment furnished as a campy bachelor pad, complete with hidden bed, hidden bar, etc., where he tries to seduce women, much homosexual humor and false accusation of homosexuality put upon an effeminate, weak man, and visual innuendo in one scene referring to several forms of fornication and oral sex.
