Product: The Next Best Thing (2000)
Rating: 2.0
Not that horrible, but still...
I put off seeing this for a long time due to the extremely bad reviews, but got cornered into seeing it the other day. I did find some admirable things about it, which I'll end the review to put it on a positive note. But it also has a bunch of problems which makes one think that Hollywood's idea of the world earns them the title of "La-La-Land".The story involves a pair of best friends, a gay male and hetero female, who have a drunken liason one night that produces a child. What I thought was going to be a comedy (as it was billed) about the adventures that this causes turns out to be a much more serious movie about other things, some good, some bad.First, we have a gardener and a yoga instructor pooling incomes. Sorry folks, these jobs don't pay a lot. While not living extravagantly, they still seem to have a lifestyle that goes way beyond their realistic incomes. This is just the first of many ways the movie is interested in portraying eye candy more than telling an even remotely realistic story.Continuing on the eye-candy role was the complete avoidance of hard-times that come with evey new baby. Since they chose to take a very serious tone in the movie, they could have shown Madonna dragging her butt out of bed at 3 a.m. to answer a cry, or hunky Everett cleaning up a big mess. But we see this apparantly absolutely perfect baby's first years bypassed to produced an apparantly absolutely perfect child. In this world, you can't be bad-looking or out of shape.So while the movie falls apart with no connection to reality whatsoever, I did find some things that salvaged a bit of it. When I still thought this was going to be a comedy, I was prepared to see a bunch of situations where certain cast members would not know the whole story, and there would be scenes to cover-up the situation. It was refreshing to see that the whole story was explained to each character as they entered the picture. The way all the characters acted here did give it a bit of intelligence, and it was refreshing to not see his parents freak out. I also liked that the movie averted negative gay stereotypes, but when the movie ended, and I heard one of my kids crying, it was nice to get back to reality.