MOVIES: Something New (Sanaa Hamri, 2006)

Pleasant, if not especially memorable, romantic comedy. The twist here is that our heroine, Kenya (Sanaa Lathan) is African-American, and feels she has to fight her attraction to Brian (Simon Baker) because he's white.

There is the obligatory "appropriate" black romantic partner brought in to add tension to the relationship between Kenya and Brian; unfortunately, the movie feels the need to stack the deck in Simon's favor by making Blair Underwood's character completely uninteresting, and Underwood more physically unattractive than he's ever been.

The biggest problem the movie faces is that the obstacles to Kenya and Brian being happy simply aren't big enough; if a romantic comedy is going to work, the audience has to be able to at least pretend that the couple isn't going to end up together (and it's always pretending, because we always know they will, or it wouldn't be a romantic comedy). But here, Kenya and Brian are such a perfect couple, and Lathan and Baker so likable together, that we can't make even that small suspension of disbelief.

The big obstacle could be racism, and the movie makes some tentative feints in that direction. Kenya's friends and relatives do a lot of teasing and scolding about her new boyfriend, but once they get to know him, they like him as much as she does. It's only Kenya herself who clings to the notion that she ought to be with a black man.

If the movie had been brave enough to put some real obstacles in their way -- had Kenya's mother (played in oddly brittle fashion by Alfre Woodard) threatened to disown her, or had Underwood's character been appealing enough to be a real alternative -- the movie would have been a lot stronger. Instead, we get Brian making puppy-dog eyes and waiting for Kenya to realize she loves him. As likable as Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker are, that's not quite enough to make the movie work.