Tween tale is simple, funny and loose

Jimmy Buffett plays a marine biology teacher and sings on the soundtrack.
By ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Survey stakes mean different things to different people. To Chamber of Commerce types, they're signs of development, jobs and "progress."
But to a few kids in fictional Coconut Cove, Fla., they're a gauntlet that's been thrown. In "Hoot," the engaging teen film based on Carl Hiassen's novel, they raise the stakes, and fight the bulldozers that follow.
All to save some very cute owls.
Roy Eberhardt (Logan Lerman, very good) is a 14-year-old who's moved around too much to suit him. Thanks to his dad's job transfer, he had to leave Montana behind for other people's idea of paradise.
"Everybody in America wants to live in Florida," he narrates. "Everybody but me."
Now he has to deal with bullies on the bus and surfing marine biology teachers (Jimmy Buffett) at school.
And then he sees the barefoot boy. He's a blond streak, sprinting faster than anybody with no shoes should be running in the land of the busted beer bottle. Roy's curiosity is piqued. As he comes to know the kid who only goes by "Mullet Fingers" (Cody Linley), and the tough soccer girl Beatrice the Bear (Brie Larson), he finds purpose, and a cause -- their cause.
They're trying to save a nest of teeny burrowing owls from a planned pancake house.
Breezy and simple
This little caper yarn's as breezy as a Buffett song (he peppers the soundtrack) and as simple. Developers don't care about critters, even the cute ones. Kids do. The things they do to get grownup attention are what the movie's about.
Veteran comic and TV director Wil Shriner ("Frasier") keeps the story funny and loose, and benefits from winning turns by Every-villain Tim Blake Nelson (as the contractor) and Luke Wilson, as the inept local cop who is looking for kid vandals, but should be reading his endangered species statutes.
It's more of an amble than a sprint, and the final destination is too, too predictable. But it's a pretty good tweens tale, produced by Buffett with the folks who made "Holes" and "Because of Winn-Dixie."
And "Hoot" is a Florida story, of the life here, wild and otherwise -- of politicians who carp about creating "12 new jobs" (minimum wage ones) when they give the destroy-to-develop crowd their way. It's vintage Carl Hiassen, a muckraking Miami Herald columnist, in other words.
It may be a coincidence that the incredibly cute critter saved here looks just like Woodsy Owl, the public service conservation mascot who reminds us to "Give a hoot, don't pollute."
Some of us do. And after "Hoot," maybe your kids will, too.