Analysis of Something New (2006)

Something New is an intriguing story about a professional Black woman, a stuffy, bourgeois, CPA, and a rugged industrialist, an architectural landscaper who just happens to be a White man, that come together under unusual circumstances and fall in love. It succinctly tells a lot of truths about how interracial relationships work from the point of a professional Black woman. Sanaa Lathan is Alfre Woodward's daughter, again, but gives you a totally different perspective on interracial relationships that you saw in Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys.

The way that the chemistry develops between Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker's characters is intense, very hot, and extremely sexy. It is an intelligent movie that delivers a compelling story about characters of which race is just the first of many differences, but the catalyst that brings them together. It isn't as much about the fact that Kenya McQueen (Sanna Lathan) is attracted to someone whose outlook on life is different than hers as much as it the fact that she continued to date the same type of Black men and was forced to consider someone with a different school through interracial relationships. There are plenty of Black men like Brian Kelly (Simon Barker) and plenty of White women like Kenya McQueen, but chances are great that they aren't going to cross each others paths.

Many times interracial relationships not only open you up to the possibility of dating someone of a different race but they also open you up to the possibility of dating someone from an entirely different culture. They are both professional people; it isn't as though Brian Kelly was a farmer or a mountain man, but they are professional in entirely different ways. His avenue was more about entrepreneurship and living life on his own terms, and hers was about climbing the social ladder.

People that exist in the same social circles are going to consider interracial relationships anyway, particularly if they are the minority in that social circle. That is not what this movie is about. That is what Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys is about though. This movie is about expanding your horizons intellectually as well as interpersonally. There are times in life when people simply need something different, and that is where Brian Kelly comes into play. I look at the interracial situations that I found myself in, and none of those women had anything in common with the Black women that I have talked to. In fact there were times where traits that I did not like in Black women, I liked in those women, which is wrong at the end of the day but I had to learn the hard way how everyone is alike. Everyone in Something New is talented, and everyone brings something interesting to the screen through the characters they play in this film. If you haven't checked it out it is a movie that is definitely worth looking into.