21 Jump Street

Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are hilarious together in the movie version of the late 80s/early 90s tv show about young cops working undercover as students in high school. The filmmakers made the wise decision to go for humor in their take on the premise. The afterschool special tone of the tv show would not have translated well into a contemporary movie. There are several episodes of the show available on imdb and hulu if you are interested, there are funny moments in the show. Jonah Hill was quoted as saying that they were attempting to make "a R-rated, insane, Bad Boys-meets-John Hughes-type movie." I think their efforts were successful.

I laughed out loud many times and that is the purpose of an all out comedy like 21 Jump Street. The movie knows what it is, it even pokes fun at itself. Things went a bit too far for me to maintain my suspended disbelief, but the chemistry of Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum more than made up for it. I want to see these two together again, it was a blast to watch them.

And on DVD...
The Outsiders

I have been reading Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe and after reading about his experiences filming Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of SE Hinton's novel, I wanted to see the movie which I had never seen before. A librarian, Jo Ellen Misakian, at Lone Star Elementary School in Fresno, California, and her students requested that Coppola make the movie. Filmed in 1982 and debuting in March of 1983, the movie has not aged well. The best thing that can be said for the film is the careers it launched and that it contains the early work of not only Lowe, but also Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, C Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, and Diane Lane. Tying the two movies together, Rob Lowe crossed paths with Holly Robinson Peete early in his career; she was in both the tv show and movie 21 Jump Street. For what it's worth, I enjoyed reading about the making of the movie more than I did watching it.