The Movies

1 The Wedding Planner

$13.5 million 1 week in release $13.5 million to date

PLOT The title character, after landing a big account, unwittingly falls in love with the wedding's groom.

CAUTION Rated PG-13 for language and some sexual humor.

BOTTOM LINE Implausible and mostly forgettable, but pleasantly entertaining and generally free of significant sexual content.

$9.8 million 3 weeks in release $59.3 million to date

PLOT After her mother's death, an aspiring ballerina moves from a small town to Chicago, where she attends a mostly black high school.

CAUTION Rated PG-13 for violence, sexual content, language, and brief drug references.

BOTTOM LINE Predictable but above-average drama encourages teens to follow their dreams.

$8.1 million 6 weeks in release $193.2 million to date

PLOT A plane crash survivor learns how to stay alive when he's stranded on a remote island.

CAUTION Rated PG-13 for intense action sequences and some disturbing images.

BOTTOM LINE Ocean and island scenes are cinematically majestic but spiritually empty.

$6.5 million 5 weeks in release $56.2 million to date

PLOT Three interwoven stories each chronicle a different aspect of the U.S. government's war on drugs.

CAUTION Rated R for pervasive drug content, strong language, violence, and some sexuality.

BOTTOM LINE Harsh but honest treatment of the U.S. drug war.

$6 million 1 week in release $6 million to date

PLOT Five high-school cheerleaders rob a bank after one of them becomes pregnant and is in need of cash.

CAUTION Rated PG-13 for language, sex-related humor, and some thematic elements.

BOTTOM LINE Cynical, sometimes funny teen comedy with very dubious morals and significant anti-Christian themes.

Two movies at the top of box office charts, each of them teen-themed, share more than their target audience in common. Both Save the Last Dance and Sugar and Spice also feature overtly Christian characters-and neither is treated too kindly. Dance's Christian high-schooler is in very few scenes, and is only mildly mocked: She's portrayed as oblivious to the world around her and vaguely racist. In Sugar, however, Christianity doesn't get off so easily. The film is about five cheerleading friends who stage a bank robbery. One of the cheerleaders is a fundamentalist Christian, and this provides fodder for recurring jokes that-sometimes viciously-mock her, her Bible-believing parents, her church, and, more often than not, her faith itself. More than just gentle pokes at evangelical Christians often found in the products of pop culture today, the jokes in Sugar are crude and blasphemous, giving a sexual connotation to pictures of Christ on the cross and painting church-goers as a cruel breed who refer to all unwed mothers as whores. Perhaps it's too soon to declare a trend, but Hollywood seems to be noticing the very real presence of outspoken Christians in public high schools, and so far it's not responding favorably.