‘New in Town’
Rating: PG for language and some suggestive material.
What it’s about: A corporate hatchet woman travels from Miami to Minnesota to lay off plant workers and discovers the rough charm of the people, and romance.
The Kid Attractor Factor: Renee Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr. making goo-goo eyes in the snow.
Good lessons/bad lessons: It’s a lot easier to put people you don’t know out of a job.
Violence: Against wildlife. Off camera.
Language: Cleaned up, but still a little swearing.
Sex: Suggestions of vigorous wrestling, a thong joke.
Drugs: When it’s 40 below, you’d hit a bar every now and then too.
Parents’ advisory: There isn’t enough slapstick for the very young, but if they’re old enough to date, they’re old enough to take in “New in Town.”
‘Taken’
Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, disturbing thematic material, sexual content, some drug references and language.
What it’s about: Naive high school girls travel to Paris and are kidnapped, with ex-CIA agent dad of one their only hope of rescue.
The Kid Attractor Factor: Action, and lots of it.
Good lessons/bad lessons: Be “aware” and “focus” when you’re in a strange land. And don’t get picked up by strangers, even if they are “hot.”
Violence: Lots and lots of it.
Language: Not much profanity.
Sex: “Sexual content” in this case means sex-slave trade.
Drugs: Girls are doped up to make them compliant.
Parents’ advisory: Pretty rough stuff for anybody under 15.
