Something New

Something New

Director: Sanaa Hamri

Screenplay by Kriss Turner

Focus Features

Last year, we got the Guess Who's Coming to Dinner switcheroo with its remake, pairing white boy Ashton Kutcher with black gal Zoe Saldana. Hilarity ensued. We all laughed at the antics. Anyway, seems as though Hollywood has gone relationship crazy lately. We've got the interracial romances (and Hitch should be roundly applauded for not making that an issue last year), the gay romances (Brokeback), the too-young-for-too-old (Prime), and so on and so forth, but no film will ever go as far as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (young black man and old white woman) did around 30 years ago. The genre has just about exhausted every angle, every misunderstanding, every type of happy ending, every psychosis, of human bonding.

Kenya (Sanaa Lathan) celebrates Valentine's Day with her single, successful friends. They are all well-to-do and looking for a brutha to complete them. One of Kenya's friends sets her up on a blind date...with whitey Brian (Simon Baker), which freaks her out on so many levels, even though he's a cutie. Of course, there's all sorts of fate involved after their first, brief encounter that Kenya cuts short, and they meet again. Brian is a landscape architect and she wants him to trim her hedges...er, plow her...er, you know, make things look nice in the backyard. At some point, Kenya dethaws and crazy fate lands them in the sack. Of course, that racial thing is hard to get over. The couple gets a hard time from her mom Joyce (Alfre Woodard), brother Nelson (Donald Faison), friend Walter (Mike Epps) and of course, girlfriends (Taraji P. Henson, Golden Brooks, Wendy Raquel Robinson). Then the perfect man, Mark (Blair Underwood), complicates matters by swooping in during troubled times.

What I found refreshing about this movie is that the motives in the movie don't have a trace of insincerity. Brian isn't trying to fulfill some exotic conquest. Her boss (Matt Malloy) isn't trying to make her a partner at the firm because of some racially-motivated need. There's no underlying ugliness to any scenes where they pull the rug out and try to make some "larger" point about race relations. More importantly, Baker and Lathan are appealing leads who carry a love story that, stripped of its racial trappings, is rather conventional. But like I said, what can they do that's special in a wide release anymore, even if its from fairly new "independent" darling Focus?

In other words, a perfect movie for Valentine's Day and the days leading up to it. I'm sure it's better than the upcoming McConaughey/Jessica Parker flick Failure to Launch opening next week.