a movie review by: Susan Granger

Remember Taye Diggs, the actor who played Angela Bassett's lover in "How Stella Got Her Groove Back"? Enough people were so impressed with him that he's got a romantic comedy of his own. Diggs plays a Chicago-based fledgling novelist whose upcoming book, "Unfinished Business," about his college experiences, has his friends buzzing, particularly regarding the steamy sections revolving around who-slept-with-whom. It's already been endorsed by Oprah Winfrey and an advance copy is doing the rounds prior to the upcoming marriage of a New York Giants running back, Morris Chestnut, and his longtime girl-friend, Monica Calhoun. It's a celebratory weekend in New York that will reunite the successful African-American college crowd once again as they face some of life's major dilemmas. Diggs is trying to dodge making a marital commitment to his current girlfriend, Sanaa Lathan, primarily because a sexy, ambitious TV producer, Nia Long, is, as one of his buddies comments, "the best girlfriend you never had," while laid-back Harold Perrineau seems to be firmly attached to domineering Melissa De Sousa, whom everyone knows is wrong for him, and Terrence Howard continues to be a perennial bachelor as well as a perennial student. Writer-director Malcolm D. Lee, a cousin of Spike Lee whose company produced the film, quickly demonstrates that film-making talent runs in the family, having genuine good fun with the universality of intimate male/female relationships, at least from the male perspective. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "The Best Man" is an amusing, energetic 7 - and stick around for the credits. Like "The Blair Witch Project," the hype for this date movie began on the Internet, building anticipation for a whalloping opening weekend.