When the college friends finally reunite over the Christmas holidays, they will discover just how easy it is for long-forgotten rivalries and romances to be ignited.
Release Date: November 15th, 2013
Starring:
Monica Calhoun
Morris Chestnut
Melissa De Sousa
Taye Diggs
Regina Hall
The Best Man was a modestly popular 1999 comedy-drama with a completely African-American ensemble cast. Some of its stars (Terrence Howard, Nia Long, Taye Diggs) have been more steadily employed and visible since than others, but all are hereby reunited for a belated sequel from the same writer-director, Malcolm D. Lee. It’s a Christmas get-together scenario with a debt to 1983’s The Big Chill, as this gang of old friends all descend on the whopping-great mansion owned by their most successful member, an American football star played by Morris Chestnut, and his wife Mia (Monica Calhoun).
The tone oscillates between raunchy, vicious, and sentimental. There’s tiresome stuff about which of the women are better at oral sex, and it reaches a nadir during the mid-film cat-fight between Regina Hall – best in show, despite her character’s demeaning backstory – and De Sousa’s scheming hussy of a reality-TV star.
This is broad-brush stuff, with little original insight into how wealth has shaped this crew for good and bad. Howard’s wacky costumes make him look like even more of a pimp than the one he played in Hustle & Flow, and Sanaa Lathan’s character, despite the excuse of being pregnant, is so strenuously passive-aggressive she gets on your nerves. Somehow, though, this bumper seasonal angst-fest gradually gets its hooks in. The cancer bombshell about a major character is more sincerely dramatised than you’re expecting, and Diggs and Chestnut create at least one persuasive relationship – they’re close friends estranged by the meteoric rise of one and the career stagnation of the other.
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Philimon Badagawa.
Philimon Badagawa is a multimedia journalist with skills in news gathering, packaging, editing and online publishing. He has knowledge in data visualization, can design and manage websites. He previously worked as a journalist with Observer media and authored several articles and stories. He does research, video & audio recording, editing and production for online publication. He Participated in The New Dawn photography campaign aimed at rebranding Northern Uganda-USAID/NUTI Project (2010). Philimon is in love with photography, writing, reading, sharing new ideas and interacting with reasonable people for skills development. He was recognized for excelling in Journalism during the Uganda Journalism Awards by ACME in 2015. (philebadagawa@gmail.com, +256 774 607 886)
