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I skipped the screening of “Hoot” and didn’t see it. But even Teh Detroit Spews’ liberal (and smart) film critic, Tom Long, says the movie, marketed at your kiddies, encourages breaking the law to save “cute owls” and fight “mean developers.”

“Hoot” is one of those films in which kids break every law in the book, but it’s OK because they have good reasons for all the law-breaking.
The good reasons in “Hoot” are, not surprisingly, cute little owls. These cute little owls live in holes in the ground instead of in trees. And a mean developer is about to plow right through the ground they live in with the intention of building a pancake restaurant.
Mean developers must be stopped, but none of the good citizens of the small Florida town in question know about the cute little owls. Except for one blond runaway boy named, and this is not a joke, Mullet Fingers (Cody Linley).
A new kid named Roy (Logan Lerman) has moved to town and discovered that it is indeed Mullet Fingers who has been committing vandalism in hopes of thwarting the developer. When he, too, spies the cute little owls, he joins forces with Mullet and Mullet’s sister, whose name is not Trout Toes but Beatrice (Brie Larson) to try and stop the developer.
Eventually, they run up charges of not only vandalism, but also of evading arrest, kidnapping and assault. And through it all, young teen Mullet is neither attending school nor receiving adult guidance of any kind. Education and upbringing are apparently irrelevant when you’re named after a fish. . . .
[I]t sends an awful lot of worrisome messages as well. Many Americans hate developers, but it’s doubtful we want to promote adolescents kidnapping and hog-tying them. Or at least probably not.