NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Eka Herlyanti If you're not ready, don't jump. And if you don't want to ruin your teen memories of Anne Hathaway as Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries or Ella in Ella Enchanted, don't watch this movie. Really. It's a perfect turnaround of her acting. I can't believe she dared to take the role. It's more than Rachel Getting Married, I guess. Well, maybe there's a reason why she decided to take this role. Yeah, I get it. She wanted to explore her acting ability, which I think is good. She's quite convincing as a black people copycat. But still, do you really have to do those naked and sex scenes, my sweet Anne??? Thank God you're not the one who did the 3 some.

SnoopyStyle Allison Lang (Anne Hathaway) is from the upper class white neighborhood of Pacific Palisades. Her parents (Michael Biehn, Laura San Giacomo) are divorced and she's not connecting with them. Her boyfriend Toby is a Wigger and a poser. He takes her and her friend Emily (Bijou Phillips) to the bad side of L.A. They try to buy drugs and get rolled by Hector (Freddy Rodríguez). Even with Toby's cowardice, she is excited by the incident and returns to the spot the next night with Emily, Amanda (Shiri Appleby) and Sasha (Alexis Dziena). She finds Hector again as she falls further and further into his dangerous world.This is a souped-up afterschool special. I don't particularly find these characters that compelling. The girls could do whatever the hell they want for all I care. It starts with the idiotic posing from Toby. It brings up an interesting casting choice. It's crazy looking back that Mike Vogel got the bigger role while Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Channing Tatum are cast as his friends. The other problematic casting choice is Freddy Rodríguez. I can't buy him as a gang leader especially since he's a foot shorter than Anne Hathaway. He's definitely not hard enough and there's a bit of Napoleon going on here. Hathaway is good in this movie and keeps it compelling. She's really the major bright spot in this.

Metal Angel Ehrler Many people complain that this film is anything but good, and they dismiss it as simple trash that overreached while trying to be affecting. Well, I'm not one of them. I am one of those who think this is, in fact, an interesting film, and very well worth the hour and a half I spent watching it.I suppose most of the negative reviews towards this film come from the fact that it did not reach the expectations people had of it. I mean take director Barbara Kopple (yes, the documentary genius director), screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (who also wrote classics like Traffic and Syriana) and Anne Hathaway in a powerfully explosive role...you'd normally expect a highly artistic, disturbingly deep and intelligent film. This film isn't any of the above, even though it TRIES to be. Nevertheless, as I've mentioned before, it does have an interesting enough plot.It's about two rich teenagers (Anne Hathaway and Bijou Phillips) who are going through their rebellious teenager stage where drinking, heavy flirting and hanging out with the tough guys is in vogue. They decide to cross over from their posh neighborhoods into downtown East side, (the Latino side, really) where hard drugs, gang violence and gun fights are at the order of the day. These teens are impressed (to put it mildly) with how "real" everything seems in the East side, and are soon begging to be admitted into the hazardous Latino gang...with expectable detrimental results.The film tries to discuss really profound and disturbing points of view, and even though it DOES tackle some issues, it all seems a bit off. Hathaway is, of course, a revelation in her first challenging role, but the rest of the actors are a bit off. In fact, everything about the movie is a bit off. Even Stephen Gaghan, who writes the screenplay, offers us a probing look into the breaches of society and the cause and effect that lead our two protagonists in a downward spiral, but he refuses to reach deeper to actually make the audience care and feel enveloped by the psychological turmoil going on-screen.I'm sure I'm portraying this to be a base and horrible film, but it isn't. I feel I watched something entertaining and that serves as an illustration to other similar films I've watched before. It's an interesting movie to seek out, and I really do recommend it, but I hope you aren't expecting a masterpiece. Just watch it 'for the fun of it' (even if this phrase sounds a bit ironic).Rating: 2 and a half stars out of 4!

tchockythegreat Despite the fact that this movie is like the umpteenth variation of Rebel Without A Cause, anybody who has gone to a high school in an affluent area in the last decade and seen the amount of pampered young 'wiggers' there are knows that the premise of this flick is relevant to today's youth and is worth exploring. Unfortunately, the movie fails to deliver on this promising premise and only succeeds in wasting a fine performance from Anne Hathaway.The movie WANTS to make a powerful statement about spoiled, naive, pseudo-disillusioned youths searching for identity in the superficial only to receive a colossal reality check when they realize the life they've been imitating isn't as glamorous as they had thought. Unfortunately, this noble message is lost in a weak script and characters that are either one-dimensional, unbelievable or both. Although one must consider the fact that the screenplay was for the most part written by a 16-year-old girl before judging it, it is disappointing that an Academy Award-winning co-writer with some experience with this genre of film (Stephen Gaghan) could not give the screenplay and characters a more authentic feel.Even if it was the screenwriter's intention to make the script's dialogue horrible for the sake of legitimizing just how inane the gang of rich white teens are acting, the horrid screen writing comes off so cartoonish that the viewer will have an extremely difficult time accepting the dialogue, and consequently the behavior, of these characters as being legitimate. As a result, the gang of rich white wannabe thugs come off, for the most part, as being overwrought caricatures saddled with some of the most laughably horrible dialogue ever heard in a motion picture. As for the gang of cholo thugs in the movie, they come off as being far too nice and too stereotypical to Latinos, and thus seem only marginally less cartoony that the gang of rich white kids.The movie's lone saving grace is Anne Hathaway. Playing a role that shares some parallels with and could be considered a natural extension of her smart-girl-with-a-rebellious-streak Meghan Green character from the short-lived TV series Get Real, hers was the only character in the movie that had any sort of depth and believability. The script, despite its many shortcomings, succeeds in making it clear just how self-aware, intelligent, and capable of good Hathaway's character is, in spite of her actions as a member of the gang of rich white teens, giving the film its lone three-dimensional character. Because of Hathaway's talent as an actress, as well as her successful exploitation of the public's predominant perception of her as a wholesome girl next door for this film, it is easy for the audience to believe that Hathaway's character is the rebel-without-a-clue fish out of water that the script is trying to portray her as. Hathaway's acting is superb, head and shoulders above anyone else in the film, which adds to her character's legitimacy. However, the people who see this movie will likely be too busy snickering at the inane lines of dialogue she's repeatedly forced to drop or, more likely, be gaping at their TV thinking "O...M...G! The chick from The Princess Diaries is actually TOPLESS!" to notice her solid performance.Which leads to a discussion of arguably the biggest reason most people even know this film exists. Hathaway has claimed in interviews that she only does nudity in films if she deems it necessary to the story. While a case can be made that most of the nudity in the film was appropriate when considering the context of the scenes in which it was featured, I find myself questioning just how "necessary" it is, for example, to show Hathaway's character popping her top while making out with her boyfriend (or for that matter, to see Bijou Phillips' character in the film topless while taking a bubble bath). That's not to say this movie should be mistaken for a late-night film on Skinemax; it most certainly isn't. But Hathaway is topless just enough in this film to make this obvious attempt to expand her acting repertoire beyond the roles in family films she had previously been limited to seem heavy-handed and maybe even a little desperate. Anne, take it from me, you're a wonderful actress. That alone will do more to land you mature roles than taking off your top for sex scenes in a poorly-scripted indie movie ever will.When all is said and done, the amount of nudity in this movie only made it worse; when you factor the amount of it in along with in how disappointing the movie is, it only adds evidence to the argument that the only reason this movie exists was for Hathaway to prove to us just how far she was willing to go to avoid being typecast as Princess Mia Thermopolis for the rest of her acting career...which is a shame, considering her legitimately solid acting job in this movie.Rent "Kids" or "Thirteen" instead; both films are about topics similar to this movie and both are far better.