Something New
isn't.
The title's bold assertion to the contrary, there's not much novelty in
Something New
-unless you count the fact that it's the first feature for director Sanaa Hamri. It's also the first
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time romantic leads Sanaa Lathan (
Alien Vs. Predator
,
Love & Basketball
) and Simon Baker (
The Ring Two
,
LA Confidential
) really have to carry a movie. And who knows, they might have been able to pull it off, had it not been for the fact that the rest of the film is sitting on them.
Kenya McQueen (Lathan) is uptight. The ambitious young executive straightens her hair, wears a business suit on weekends and doesn't like dogs, hiking or insects. Also, when she spills coffee on the floor of her flossy new LA home she tries to get it off the carpet with some kind of fabric cleaner-can you believe it? She's that neurotic! But adorably so, according to Brian (Baker), the scruffy blond landscaper she meets on a blind date. Brian being everything Kenya isn't (dirty, dog-loving and descended from Europeans, among other reprehensible qualities) she refuses to date him, instead hiring him to deal with her overgrown garden. My moviegoing companion and I laughed aloud, but not nicely I am afraid, at clunky shots of Brian in Kenya's backyard, grunting manfully and wrestling with a long pipe-like implement (reminiscent, in its unironic way, of Bogart chucking firewood into the Freudian engine of
The African Queen
). Presented with such a burning hunk of Irish-American masculinity, no matter how paternalistic the script forces him to be ("I don't think you take the time to
know who you are," being just one of the insultingly officious things he's required to say), can Kenya continue to resist? And will her aristocratic Baltimore-descended family (including Alfre Woodard, elevating the material as Kenya's high-society mother) be displeased if she turns down
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the IBM-Ideal Black Man-in the form of suave (but distinctly unctuous) law professor Blair Underwood?
Something New
could have been uncomfortable and illuminating, given an impertinent script by, say, Hanif Kureshi (
My Beautiful Laundrette
) or Spike Lee; a little Gator Purify (
Jungle Fever
) would have gone a long way. Instead, complacency and cliché dominate scene after scene, populated with characters you can't tell apart (unforgiveable and even, dare one say, racist), shockingly poor editing and emotional revelations that come across as completely unearned. Like many stories purporting to be about race,
Something New
actually deals with class; the difficulties Kenya encounters with Simon have much more to do with her cultural capital and her tax bracket than his sunburn. Which could still be interesting-if it weren't for the fact that
Something New
commits the cardinal sin of being the same old unfunny shtick.
