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Guess Who
The late Bernie Mac makes the 2005 comedy Guess Who seem a lot better than it really is.
This comedy is actually a re-thinking of the classic 1967 melodrama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? which found a white girl bringing her black fiancee home to meet her parents. In this version, a black girl is bringing her white fiancee home to meet her parents. Now in the '67 film, the black fiancee was a doctor, here the white fiancee has just quit his job and hasn't told anyone about it, including his fiancee. This is all occurring while the girls' parents are planning to renew their vows after 25 years of marriage.
I was a big fan of the 1967 film despite its sketchy and convenient approach to the subject matter. In that film, they made the black fiancee an important doctor who had just lost his wife and child in an accident. The girls parents in that film are also given limited time to decide how they feel because the couple is planning to leave the country that night. I had always wondered what the film would have been like if the girl had brought home a drug dealer or a pimp instead of an important doctor with a million degrees and without the time restraint and both those issues are addressed in this film version.
It just seemed more realistic story that the fiancee in question was unemployed just as he was freaking out about meeting his future in-laws, though I would have liked to have seen him be honest with his fiancee and watch them battle dad together. In the '67 film, Sidney Poitier told Tracy and Hepburn he would not marry Katharine Houghton without their blessing. I liked the fact that this was not an issue with the fiancee here, though we do see, primarily through director Kevin Rodney Sullivan's camerawork, the fiancee winning over his future mother-in-law.
William Rose, who won an Oscar for the screenplay for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? is actually given screen credit here, but I don't know why, there isn't a word of dialogue from his screenplay here. I have to admit that even though it did make me laugh, the scene at the dinner table where the fiancee starts telling black jokes teetered on the edge of tastelessness.
Despite my issues with the story, the performances are surprisingly solid. Bernie Mac eeked every bit of comic gold out of his role and Ashton Kutcher was shockingly restrained as the fiancee. Zoe Saldana was lovely as the daughter/fiancee caught in the middle and I loved Judith Scott as the mom. The film is beautiful to look at and I liked John Murphy's music. Despite its predictability, the late Bernie Mac makes it worth a look.
The late Bernie Mac makes the 2005 comedy Guess Who seem a lot better than it really is.
This comedy is actually a re-thinking of the classic 1967 melodrama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? which found a white girl bringing her black fiancee home to meet her parents. In this version, a black girl is bringing her white fiancee home to meet her parents. Now in the '67 film, the black fiancee was a doctor, here the white fiancee has just quit his job and hasn't told anyone about it, including his fiancee. This is all occurring while the girls' parents are planning to renew their vows after 25 years of marriage.
I was a big fan of the 1967 film despite its sketchy and convenient approach to the subject matter. In that film, they made the black fiancee an important doctor who had just lost his wife and child in an accident. The girls parents in that film are also given limited time to decide how they feel because the couple is planning to leave the country that night. I had always wondered what the film would have been like if the girl had brought home a drug dealer or a pimp instead of an important doctor with a million degrees and without the time restraint and both those issues are addressed in this film version.
It just seemed more realistic story that the fiancee in question was unemployed just as he was freaking out about meeting his future in-laws, though I would have liked to have seen him be honest with his fiancee and watch them battle dad together. In the '67 film, Sidney Poitier told Tracy and Hepburn he would not marry Katharine Houghton without their blessing. I liked the fact that this was not an issue with the fiancee here, though we do see, primarily through director Kevin Rodney Sullivan's camerawork, the fiancee winning over his future mother-in-law.
William Rose, who won an Oscar for the screenplay for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? is actually given screen credit here, but I don't know why, there isn't a word of dialogue from his screenplay here. I have to admit that even though it did make me laugh, the scene at the dinner table where the fiancee starts telling black jokes teetered on the edge of tastelessness.
Despite my issues with the story, the performances are surprisingly solid. Bernie Mac eeked every bit of comic gold out of his role and Ashton Kutcher was shockingly restrained as the fiancee. Zoe Saldana was lovely as the daughter/fiancee caught in the middle and I loved Judith Scott as the mom. The film is beautiful to look at and I liked John Murphy's music. Despite its predictability, the late Bernie Mac makes it worth a look.