Andres-Camara Watching this movie, I wonder if I'm watching a movie or a movie for television, I think I'm watching a movie for television, which is not bad if it's good but it's also not. It has a luxury cast that stays halfway and little more because it is not well worn.Julianne Moore as always seems to me wonderful, I have not seen this woman a bad interpretation. But the rest of the cast, I'm sorry but it does not tell me anything.Julianne Moore as always seems to me wonderful, I have not seen this woman a bad interpretation. But the rest of the cast, I'm sorry but it does not tell me anything.You know quickly where the film is going, the racial issues, what happens is that afterwards it is so dispersed and touches so many things but it does not explain anything that does not catch you in any moment.The last sequence of the film remains, but I imagine that for production issues, it would have to be put.It has a beautiful photograph, yes, it is a photograph that helps you to get into that world, the problem is that the rest takes you out.The address does not tell me anything. She does not get hooked, scatters me, does not know how to make plans that narrate, is not good.A movie to forget

raedwulf-01209 The direction, script etc.. were a little lacking but not enough on their own to sink this movie outright. The rock that ultimately does it is Julianne Moore, who is so 'acting' and you feel that. At times its as if she's in a struggle to dumb down herself enough to try and BE that character but just can't get to it so what comes out is this pose. You can actually see the transition on her face and it steals away any credibility in the character instantly. I don't blame her, acting has to be a really tough gig but roles like this are what make academy award performances. Julianne just doesn't have the chops for it and the director should have axed her early.

sddavis63 There were a lot of potentially good movies in this. The story of a woman who reports her child kidnapped by a carjacker could have been a good movie. The story of the tense relationship between police and the African American community could have made a good movie. The story of the group who search for missing children could have made a good movie. The story of the police detective whose own son is in jail could have made a good movie. Somehow, though, when you force all of those different stories together you don't come out of it with a good movie. Instead, you come out with a muddle that doesn't really seem sure of where it's going and seems to lack any real sense of focus or purpose.The performances from leads Julianne Moore (as the mother of the missing child) and Samuel L. Jackson (as the police detective) were all right. Neither hurt the movie; neither were outstanding.In the end, the muddled state of the movie becomes very apparent in the last 20-30 minutes. At that point, it seems as if director Joe Roth is having a real dilemma trying to figure out where to end this story. It seems to go through fits and starts making its way to a conclusion, as if at the end of the muddle, it was suddenly necessary to try to tie up loose ends of story lines that frankly weren't all that riveting to begin with and could really have been dispensed with. A part of the movie's problem, I suppose, could have been that it just suffers from the inevitable challenge of turning a novel into a movie. I'll confess that I haven't read the novel. Maybe the muddle seems clearer when it's on paper, when you can rehash things more easily, and of course the written word allows for more detailed explanation of plot points. Still, the novel was adapted for the screen by its own author, Richard Price, who isn't a rookie at writing for the screen either. I would have expected him to do a better job of producing a coherent script that was tight enough to work in a 2 hour movie. (3/10)

Jakealope This movie was a crock from the start. The writer Price is some white liberal who anointed himself as an interpreter of inner city blacks to us ignorant white yahoos. His previous venture was the better "Clockers", which was made into a lame movie by Spike Lee. In a country where the two latest racial flaps were a black whore falsely accusing 3 frat boys of rape and that case dragged on for a year in spite of the fact EVERY shred of evidence pointed to their innocence and the woman changed her story with the weather. Don't forget how every white academic liberal and their black studies cohort spewed venom on the students based on the old ante-bellum "slaves being raped by massa" myth, which goes against reality where there are 112 black on white rapes for every case of the reverse. Or the Jena 6 case where six violent black youths beat a white kid silly. But since some nooses were hung months earlier, which had nothing to do with either race or the kid they beat, the black power movement and the white liberal drones descended on Jena to exonerate the punks and excoriate the town. But, in their defense, I do add that attempted murder was too steep a charge, but those Jena 6 punks belong in jail, not addressing the NAACP or appearing on BET.Back to the movie, this wigged out white mother, Julianne Moore, claimed she was carjacked and her kid was taken from her, and this happened in the projects. She is no racist, as a matter of fact she works in the same project in the day care center, along with her son who is in the class. So naturally everyone goes haywire trying to find the kid. There are shades of the 1994 Susan Smith case, the murdering Southern mom who killed her kids then tried to blame it on a black man. But, as I remember, the police never bought her story and never shut down a project either. Her brother is a white cop in the neighboring working class suburb. Natch, he's a racist and angry as heck. Yet even he thinks his sister is a loser who is hiding something. So the suburban cops buffalo themselves into the city and shut down the project This is the first bit of unreality. As if the city and the mayor are going to put up with this. As if ten thousand lawyers, civil rights protesters, Sharpton rabble rousers and Nation of Islam thugs wouldn't descend on this city in a matter of hours; this in the middle of New Jersey not the Sudan, in 1999, not 1949. That alone makes most of the other racial drama superfluous. Then there is the other persistent whine about "Our black kids go missing and you do nothing, but when a white kid goes missing....", like the black on black crime whine(as if black on white crime is acceptable), this falls on deaf ears to me since it is the criminal street code of silence and the horrid conditions of black inner city "families" that hinder solving and creates the conditions for those crimes and tragedies.The movie quickly devolves into an almost father - daughter relation between Detective Council, Sam Jackson, and the distraught mother Brenda Martin, played by Julianne Moore. Credit must be given to Ms. Moore for her thankless performance of a really messed up woman, as well as to Edie Falco, who played a woman who finds lost children and helps crack the case. Samuel Jackson played the requisite strong black guy who sets all the racist whites, as well as his brood in the projects, straight. He even had a chance to quell the requisite racial confrontation in the end by telling everyone the case was solved, but that would have been too simple. I wonder if all those black cops in New Orleans, the ones who looted and abandoned their posts during the flood or committed violent crimes on the side should invite him in as a role model? He even has a nice working class white guy cop sidekick, William Forsythe, just to make us trailer trash feel a little better about themselves, "Find a strong black man to teach you and you can be enlightened as I am", is what the writer seems to be saying through him. As a missing child case, this might had made a good Lifetime movie. But with the hyped up, dishonestly created racial tension as the theme, it is an exercise in affirmative action film-making designed to elicit outrage when none was called for.