“THINK LIKE A MAN” FEELS FAMILIAR

“THINK LIKE A MAN” FEELS FAMILIAR

“Think Like A Man” is so bad not even Entertainment Weekly can find much good to say about it.

That said, most of the people at the screening I attended seemed to like it. Also significant, the college student (a guy) who was running the screening seemed to like it.

So maybe, the bottom line is “Think Like A Man” appeals most to single males and females who haven’t had much experience watching movies or sit-com TV. In other words, tweeners and teenagers.

Were you interested in Steve Harvey’s best-selling romance advice book in 2009, “Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man?” If so, you are quite likely inexperienced enough to enjoy the movie “Think Like A Man,” directed by Tim Storey (“Barbershop”), with an ensemble cast of 10 beautiful people (five from each gender).

The dialogue is lively. The clothes are terrific. The escapades in this dating game have a comfortable familiarity.

Note to the politically correct: none of these couples is gay, transgendered or physically handicapped; neither are there any mixed-race couples.

Basically this is an African-American cast with a couple of token white guys thrown in.

It is nice that Story includes a few scenes for all the guys where bold racial slurs are hurled back and forth freely among them – white and black – and it is ok because they are all friends.

This can be read as cinema’s attempt to continue leading the way in showing black and white races how it is possible to co-exist without being preoccupied with self-censorship and rigid politically correctness. 

Anthropologically speaking, we also learn the romantic ways of the heart do not care about skin color. Maybe cultural differences abound in every other aspect of their lives -- such as styles of dress, manners of speech, strategies for success – when it comes to love, we are all in the same boat together.

“Think Like A Man” starts out with the five guys either in a bar or at a public gym playing half-court basketball, while the gals are mostly in their homes or more polite public settings.

They are already paired up and having relationship problems, which are then handled by Steve Harvey sitting on high, dispensing advice from Olympus by quoting from his own book.

So we follow all five of these stories, an experience which feels like using the TV remote to keep switching among five different channels of sit-com television.

Despite all the complications they have, everyone ends up exactly where you think they will. In its own way, this is kind of reassuring, as well.