"Made in America"
                          A Film Review
                               by
                      Linda Lopez McAlister

   Summer is just about here and the summer movies are arriving.
This is, on the whole, bad news not good, and I feel lucky when I
can find even one new release I want to see and write about.  (The
one I'm longing for--"Much Ado About Nothing"--won't even get to
Tampa until June 25).  Of this week's crop the new Whoopi Goldberg
movie, "Made in America" is the one I homed in on, and while it's
surely not a great movie, it turned out to be quite a pleasant and
fun way to spend a humid, rainy afternoon.

   I didn't enjoy it quite a much as I did last summer's "Sister
Act," but it comes close.  The screenplay here was written by a
woman from a story by three women and it is about a situation that
only contemporary women could find themselves in.  Whoopi Goldberg
plays a woman who owns and operates The African Queen, a bookstore
that specializes in Africana in Oakland, CA.  Eighteen years before
she had undergone artificial insemination and given birth to a
daughter, Zora, presumably because she and her late husband Charlie
had been unable to conceive.  Now Zora (Nia Long) is a senior in
high school and figures out from a biology class blood-typing
exercise that she could not have been Charlie's daughter.  She and
her best friend Tea Cakes (Will Smith) go down to the sperm bank
and while Tea Cakes makes a deposit Zora sneaks into their computer
records and finds the name of her mother's sperm donor and then
seeks him out.  To everyone's (except the audience's) surprise,
Daddy turns out to be none other than a phony cowboy car dealer
famous for his asinine tv commercials Hal's Your Pal Jansen played
by Ted Danson.  Not exactly the tall, intelligent, black man whose
sperm had been requested.  Zora is devastated, her mother is
devastated, Hal is shocked (literally as well as figuratively) when
he finds out.

   That sets up the plot; how it careens zanily from there under
Richard Benjamin's fluid direction, is what you'll go to the movie
to see, so I won't say any more.  This is a comedy so it doesn't
strive to make heavy philosophical statements, yet, given the
nature of the subject matter, it can't avoid issues such as the
nature of parenthood--is it merely a biological thing, or does it
have to do with fulfilling a parenting role?   The film, as you've
already noticed from the characters' names, is filled with
allusions to Black culture, and is, in fact, a highly multicultural
affair.  It's immensely refreshing to see actors of many colors,
ethnicities, and sexualities throughout this film.  This is also
the first film I recall seeing in which there is an interracial
romantic interest that isn't portrayed as some tragic problem.  If
you believe the tabloids this on-screen romance between Whoopi and
Ted has continued off-screen as well.

   Where the film falls short, I think, is in the humor department.
Bits and pieces of it are very funny, but it's not consistently so.
Once everybody gets over being a stereotype at the beginning of the
film and they start becoming more fully developed characters, there
is a kind of pleasant good feeling about the characters but the
laughter stops.  Taking a page out of the "Sister Act" book, the
film ends with a rousing musical number that takes place not in a
church but at Zora and Tea Cakes' high school graduation--so don't
make a dash for the door when the credits start--there's more to
come.

   Whoopi Goldberg is perhaps the only star in Hollywood who can
pack a theater with thoroughly racially mixed audiences.  I'm glad
that she's making films like these that depict people in transition
from racial stereotying to understanding and harmony and doing so
with enormous integrity and respect.  We need to see that kind of
optimism in the media to counter all the divisive images we see all
the time.  Good going Whoopi.

   For the WMNF Womnen's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on
women and film.