We the Party

Despite its flashy cinematography and colorful sets, it contains a great deal that is serious about growing up in America today.

While We the Party can be insensitive, or blind, to the misogyny and homophobia of the general culture (the token gay teen is a finger-snapping, head-bobbing fashionista), it takes the issues of race and class quite seriously.

Other Van Peebleses also populate the movie, and all are serviceable enough as actors; it would be nice to see them in less earnest, more original material.

The naughty-yet-nurturing tone is certainly unusual, but in working so hard to be the adult who "gets" kids yet lectures them at the same time, he's ended up with a colorful but superficial mess.

This South Los Angeles-set dramedy flirts with terminal stereotypes and high-school movie cliches right and left.

The movie spends almost as much time allowing the filmmaker, playing a progressive-minded teacher, to push his students to be better citizens by interviewing homeless people on skid row (!) as it does watching the younger generation trying to get some. It's an uneasy mixture of crude yukking and mixed-message uplift that satisfies on neither level.

With the raunch of "American Pie" and the heart of an after-school special, the comedy turns out to be a lot less than the sum of its parts.