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Brown Sugar | 2002 | PG-13 | - 3.2.5

Sidney (Sanaa Lathan) is a respected music critic and Dre (Taye Diggs) is a successful but unhappy music executive. Both attribute their relationship, as well as their careers, to having witnessed the birth of hip-hop on a New York street in the late 1980s. They now realize that fulfillment can come from revisiting that childhood experience. Also with Mos Def, Queen Latifah and Nicole Ari Parker. [1:48]

SEX/NUDITY 3 - A man and woman kiss passionately and caress each other and we see them in bed covered with sheets after they have had sex (the man is bare-chested and he gets out of bed wearing jockey shorts). A woman in a wrap dress kisses a man on the nose and then on the mouth; they kiss passionately and the man begins to unwrap the woman's dress. A man and a woman kiss romantically and talk. A woman invites a man to have sex, and a boy and a girl look at each other admiringly and hold hands. Men and woman are shown kissing and hugging (as a greeting, after a wedding, a man and woman kiss and she smacks his buttocks, a man kisses a woman's hand, etc.) and dancing and hugging in many scenes. Men and women are shown flirting with each other. A woman wears a dress that has an opening down to her abdomen. A woman wears an oversized shirt that is unbuttoned to reveal a part of her breast and we also see her bare legs. Women wear outfits that reveal cleavage, bare shoulders and bare midriffs. There is a running gag about a woman's "massager" (it is suggested that it is a vibrator) being used as a replacement for a man, and there is some homosexual innuendo: a man suggests that when Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains walk off into the fog in "Casablanca" there was something more than friendship between them.

VIOLENCE/GORE 2 - Two women talk in a kickboxing class and as they get more agitated, they punch the punching pads harder and harder, eventually yelling at each other. Two men play fight.

LANGUAGE 5 - 1 F-word, 7 sexual references (there are several more in the lyrics of a song that we hear snippets of a couple of times), 10 scatological terms, 8 anatomical terms, 20 mild obscenities, 5 religious exclamations, 1 derogatory term for African-Americans.

SUBSTANCE USE - People are shown drinking alcohol, sometimes to the point of inebriation.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Freedom, hip-hop, relationships, friendship, order, chaos, change, divorce, alimony, differences between men and women, selling out, infidelity, scruples, conflict of interest.

MESSAGE - We should all have the courage to do what we believe in.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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