The Next Best Thing (15) General release
Hollywood's flirtation with what has been tagged as fag-hag cinema is a cosy little sub-genre which usually hinges on the close friendship between a gay man who enjoys an active sex life, generally on-screen, and a heterosexual woman who relies on his shoulder to cry on as she despairs about ever finding the right man for herself.
The best examples have been Nicholas Hytner's The Object of My Affection, which had the nerve to face up to the problems it posed when a pregnant single woman (Friends star Jennifer Aniston) fell in love with a gay teacher (Paul Rudd); and P.J. Hogan's breezy comedy, My Best Friend's Wedding, in which Rupert Everett played the gay man who helped his best friend (Julia Roberts) - at one stage by pretending to be sexually involved with her - to wreck the marriage plans of her ex-lover.
It's the other way round in the trying Trick, due at the IFC next month, in which Tori Spelling is the straight woman offering advice to her gay best friend (Christian Campbell, brother of Neve) about his latest relationship. And there's more next week in the dire Three to Tango in which Friends star Matthew Perry plays an architect pretending to be gay and secretly lusting after a young woman played by Neve Campbell herself.
Meanwhile, The Next Best Thing, which opens today, brings off-screen close friends Madonna and Rupert Everett together for a surprisingly conventional and bland romantic comedy in which she plays a Los Angeles yoga instructor whose latest live-in lover (Michael Vartan) has moved out, and Everett is the gay gardener who offers consolation and a few bitchy one-liners to cheer her up. One night, after a few margaritas too many, they go even further and have sex, and soon afterwards she is pregnant.
So far, so potentially amusing and interesting. Unfortunately, the screenwriter, Tom Ropelewski, appears clueless as how to advance this premise in dramatic terms, and presumably out of sheer desperation, he awkwardly shifts the mood of the movie and contorts it into a shallow spin on Kramer vs. Kramer. Coincidentally, the fly in the ointment is an investment banker played by Benjamin Bratt, the off-screen partner of Everett's former on-screen partner, Julia Roberts. In fact, when the Bratt character is introduced and shown to share Everett's narcissistic interest in gym-toned body-pumping, it seems likely that it's the two men who are more suited to each other.
The picture is padded out with several renditions of American Pie to plug the soundtrack album released by Madonna's record label, and an embarrassing sequence of the two stars in a drunken pastiche of Fred and Ginger to the music of Steppin' Out With My Baby.
Everett does what he can with such hopelessly slender material, while Madonna gives a curiously remote performance which shows signs of Streisand Syndrome - just as Barbra's legs and face have been admired so conspicuously in her recent movies, the 40-plus Madonna is assured from the outset that she's "sweet" and "beautiful" and has a "fantastic body". The director of The Next Best Thing is John Schlesinger who has long fallen from such celebrated heights as Billy Liar, Darling and Midnight Cowboy. Ironically, the new film, in its desperation to appear liberal, falls very far short of Sunday, Bloody Sunday, an altogether more perceptive, candid and involving movie which dealt with a sexual triangle involving gay, heterosexual and bisexual characters - and was directed by John Schlesinger all of 30 years ago.
Michael Dwyer
Big Momma's House (12) General release
He may be a huge star in his own right on the far side of the Atlantic, but Martin Lawrence has always been seen as something of a poor man's Eddie Murphy over here, a situation unlikely to be rectified by his new comedy, which is already a huge hit in the US. Murphy, having revived his career with the aid of latex and fat suits in the likes of The Nutty Professor and Dr Do-little, Lawrence takes the same route here, as an FBI agent who disguises himself as the massive matriarch of the title in his efforts to protect a young woman (Nia Long) from an escaped convict.
If your taste runs to broad slapstick, fart jokes and a hefty dollop of Deep South sentimentality, then Big Momma is for you. It's certainly not the worst of its ilk, and Lawrence does have an easygoing charm about him. It may be deeply predictable, formulaic, even inane entertainment, but amidst the flood of rubbish which the distributors are putting out this month (too much competition from Euro 2000, perhaps?) it suddenly doesn't look too bad.
Hugh Linehan
Maybe Baby (18) General release
Once in a while a film comes along which encapsulates everything that's wrong with a particular type of movie. Ben Elton's excruciating "comedy", based on his own novel (not a good sign to begin with) is such a specimen. In truth, it's a challenge to convey how squirmingly, toe-curlingly awful Maybe Baby is, but at the moment it's the main contender for the hotly-contested title of Worst British Film of the Year.
Hugh Laurie and Joely Richardson play the middle-class media couple obsessed with having a child, but not having much success. At the same time, his career at the BBC is going down the toilet, and her eye is wandering towards dark, handsome actor James Purefoy. In the background, a gaggle of familiar telly faces (Rowan Atkinson, Dawn French, Joanna Lumley) mug it up with all the finesse of a Vicar of Dibley episode.
As a stand-up comedian and writer, Elton has often been accused of smugness, and he lives up to that reputation here with some aplomb. Maybe Baby is littered with sketches which tell us far more than they intended about the way British luvvies think. A running gag about a John Birt-type bureaucrat bullying Laurie out of his job in BBC drama and into the "ghastly" children's department comes across as the worst kind of insider sniggering (one of the co-producers is BBC Films). Tom Hollander plays a pretentiously trendy Scottish film director (the fact that he's called Ewan Proclaimer gives some idea of the level of humour here) who offends Laurie's delicate sensibilities with his plans for a junkie comedy (yes, Maybe Baby is hopelessly out of date as well).
Elton seems to have no idea how to get his two leads, Laurie and Richardson, to play off each other, and the clumsy narrative structure means that they appear to be inhabiting two different films. Laurie, in particular, looks deeply uncomfortable with what, in the US, would be the "Tom Hanks role", and one can't help feeling sorry for this perfectly good light comic actor, trapped in this ghastly excuse of a movie.
Michael Dwyer
