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Same Kind of Different as Me | 2017 | PG-13 | - 2.4.3

A wealthy art dealer (Greg Kinnear) befriends a chronically homeless man (Djimon Hounsou) so that he can impress his Christian wife (Renée Zellweger), who dreams of improving the lives of the less fortunate. Finally her husband begins to listen. Also with Olivia Holt, Jon Voight and Stephanie Leigh Schlund. Directed by Michael Carney. [2:00]

SEX/NUDITY 2 - A husband and his wife hug and kiss for several seconds in a darkened living room and she leads him off screen (sex is implied). A husband kisses his wife on the forehead in three scenes. A husband and his wife dance on a patio and she dances with a male friend, hugging him as well. A man sits on a couch and his ill wife leans against one arm of the couch and places her legs across his lap as he holds onto her knees.
 A husband and his wife each say, "I love you." A woman tells a man to "Tell your wife about your friend or I will" and the camera cuts to the married couple looking sad, arguing with screams and complaining that they have not been intimate for at least two years; later, the wife calls the other woman and tells her, "I don't blame you and I forgive you."
 A man in a homeless camp approaches a woman, asking, "You ain't got a man? I have a bed for you right here," and she ignores him. A dying woman tells her teen son and daughter that she wants their father to remarry and for them to honor the new wife; she tells her husband that she wants him to be happy.
 A reception includes several women wearing gowns that have straps that reveal partially bared backs and necklines that reveal cleavage.

VIOLENCE/GORE 4 - A woman needs a tire changed and an African-American boy is about to help her and her son when she begins calling him names; three white men on horses ride up and tell him to stop bothering white ladies and one of the horsemen places a rope around his neck and drags him out of the frame (presumably dragging the African-American boy down the road as the scene ends).
 A man violently kicks in the swinging doors of a mission's full dining room and shouts, "I'm gonna kill whoever done it!" as he swings a baseball bat, exclaiming, "I'm gonna kill him!" and he pounds the bat on tables where people are eating and crashes the bat through a hallway picture window that shatters into shards; a woman shouts at him for several seconds and he exits, slamming a swinging door and slamming the bat on a wall and another man says the violent man's name is "Suicide."
 While a man is parked on an urban street at night, a homeless woman pounds on the window, whooping, "Are you looking for me? I been looking for you!" as a man rushes out from bushes and throws another man onto the pavement, shakes a ball bat, and shouts, "I'll kill you!" and then runs to the car and smashes the passenger side window to pieces and runs away (no one is injured).
 A middle-school boy wakes up at night to find his plantation shack on fire; we see a lot of smoke and a few flames as he shouts and pulls his younger brother out, but we hear that their grandmother died in the fire while asleep (we see the charred remains of the shack later and we hear that there was no electricity or heat in the shack).
 A prisoner stands guard with a rifle over other prisoners who are working with rakes and another prisoner passes him a short knife; we hear that a man came to his cell to harm him, but the man in the cell killed him with the knife. We see a flashback to a man trying to hold up a bus driver, but a police officer pointed a handgun at him to stop the crime and the man served 10 years in prison.
 A man growls at people in a mission cafeteria line and shouts at a man and woman to mind their own business. A man points a ball bat at a startled man and demands to know if he's with the federal government, and then says, "Control your woman. I'm not gonna hurt you." A man shoots a rifle at a clay target and we hear the shot, but do not see a hit.
 In a flashback a young man is baptized by a pastor in a river, but goes under too long and floats downstream; church members cannot find him and a voiceover of the boy as a man says that he was baptized to eliminate any black magic in him from plantation life and that he kept watch for alligators when he was in the water.
 A woman stands in a hallway grimacing for a long time with pain and the camera cuts to an X-ray of a bladder containing dark areas (we later hear that she has cancer). A man says, "I've had prostate cancer for four years and it's never bothered me a bit." A woman tells another woman that she is terminally ill, upsetting her badly and the camera cuts to the sick woman behind the wheel of her parked car, crying. A man lies on his couch, feeling sick, but his son gets him up and helps him to his riding mower, which he rides quite a distance away from the camera.
 An African-American man sees paintings of two Klansmen and cries as he tells another man that he and a white boy were friends as boys; in a flashback, the white boy took him to his barn to show him KKK regalia and the boys wore robes and hoods and played swords with crosses until the white boy's mom came and threw the other boy out. A husband and his wife argue in a mission house kitchen and a man at the end of the kitchen calls out, "My wife wears the pants, too, sir!" A man asks if there are any infectious diseases floating around and another man jokes, "Absolutely!" At dinner, a man's father tells him that a mission is full of criminals and germs, and is dirty and diseased. A man tells a rich man that his uncle took him and his brother as boys to a plantation to work for a man who never paid them, that they were forced to work seven days a week all year for several years. A man talks about running away from servitude on a freight train and that a man tried to steal his shoes his first night, but that he kept his shoes and took the man's pistol away from him. A man says a male friend in a wheelchair was a hard worker until he had a stroke, after which the world ignored him; they live in a homeless camp under tree-branch huts, wear old clothing, and have brownish teeth. A woman from a homeless camp has a bruised cheek and one brown tooth; she tells a mission worker that her husband was not nice and "they" (probably the court) took away her son. A coffin at a church funeral is nearly completely covered with bright small flowers and a long line of people each place a yellow rose in front of the coffin on the floor; a man gives a eulogy and becomes tearful, saying "We'll never know whose eyes God is watching us through," and two men see a shooting star and wonder if it is the deceased woman. A husband and his wife argue briefly at home. A husband and his wife ride horses on their ranch and stop near a tree where she shouts out into a field that she loves her husband and then tells him that this is where she wants to be buried.
 In a dream, a woman sits in a chair at the foot of the bed of her dying self in a hospital room, then gets up and goes through an elevator door ending up on a grassy path, and she walks through a forest where she sees a man wearing a suit digging a deep hole like a grave (she startles awake from the dream).
 An urban area is covered with a lot of debris, graffiti designs all over several building walls, some buildings are boarded up, and old couches and ripped armchairs are shown in an alley across from a mission center; an elderly man sits on one of the couches in many scenes and one homeless man says he was an executive chef until he used alcohol and drugs after his son was killed by a drunk driver and his wife succumbed to mental illness.
 An EMT vehicle takes on a gurney with a homeless individual and a cruiser blocks the street (we do not hear what happened).
 A man in a film spits out a seed, but we do not see it; we do hear spitting sounds. A man flushes a toilet off-screen and we hear the flush.

LANGUAGE 3 - 2 anatomical terms, 3 mild obscenities, 6 derogatory terms for African-Americans, name-calling (lazy, old cynic, crazy old man, crazy old lady, mean old daddy, ridiculous, boy, killer, bums, rich-folk game), exclamations (ai-yai-yai, shut-up), 7 religious exclamations (Amen, Hallelujah, In The Name Of The Father, Son, And Holy Ghost, God is in the recycling business, I asked God to heal her, God sets people in front of us, people say grace before a dinner, a woman tells her teenage children that she will die and watch them from Heaven).

SUBSTANCE USE - A boy gives his grandmother a red pain pill that she calls "red devils" (we do not see her swallow it), a woman asks a man for money and he gives her some bills and says "no drugs" as she walks away saying "yeah" unconvincingly, a kitchen table has about six pill bottles on it, and a coffee table has two prescription bottles on it. A reception party features glasses of champagne in the hands of men and women (no one is seen drinking), a man sits at an outdoor table with a glass of beer (he does not drink), a man holds a short glass of whiskey-and-Coke in several scenes and he drives a riding mower while holding it and he and his son argue about driving and drinking, a man holds a glass of whiskey and coke in two meal scenes, a man's son gives him a bottle of whiskey, and a man tells his son that he quit drinking.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Racism, urban mission ministries, indentured servitude, Southern plantations in the 1940s-1960s, chronic homelessness, urban poverty, values, helping others, trust, friendship, unconditional love, faith, doubt, pain, sickness, cancer, death, Christianity, heaven, conflict, reconciliation.

MESSAGE - We are all homeless, working our way home with the help of friends.

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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