# Best Man, The (1999/I)

### reviewed by
Susan Granger

http://www.speakers-podium.com/susangranger.

    Susan Granger's review of "THE BEST MAN" (Universal Pictures)

Remember Taye Diggs, the actor who played Angela Bassett's lover in "How Stella Got Her Groove Back"? Enough people were so impressed with him that he's got a romantic comedy of his own. Diggs plays a Chicago-based fledgling novelist whose upcoming book, "Unfinished Business," about his college experiences, has his friends buzzing, particularly regarding the steamy sections revolving around who-slept-with-whom. It's already been endorsed by Oprah Winfrey and an advance copy is doing the rounds prior to the upcoming marriage of a New York Giants running back, Morris Chestnut, and his longtime girl-friend, Monica Calhoun. It's a celebratory weekend in New York that will reunite the successful African-American college crowd once again as they face some of life's major dilemmas. Diggs is trying to dodge making a marital commitment to his current girlfriend, Sanaa Lathan, primarily because a sexy, ambitious TV producer, Nia Long, is, as one of his buddies comments, "the best girlfriend you never had," while laid-back Harold Perrineau seems to be firmly attached to domineering Melissa De Sousa, whom everyone knows is wrong for him, and Terrence Howard continues to be a perennial bachelor as well as a perennial student. Writer-director Malcolm D. Lee, a cousin of Spike Lee whose company produced the film, quickly demonstrates that film-making talent runs in the family, having genuine good fun with the universality of intimate male/female relationships, at least from the male perspective. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "The Best Man" is an amusing, energetic 7 - and stick around for the credits. Like "The Blair Witch Project," the hype for this date movie began on the Internet, building anticipation for a whalloping opening weekend.

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