AND THEN CAME LOVE: DVD

SYNOPSIS:
Julie (Vanessa Williams) is a successful magazine columnist with everything - a great job, a rent controlled apartment, an adoring boyfriend and adorable six-year-old son Jake (Jeremy Gumbs). But her perfect world is shaken when she seeks out the anonymous sperm donor who fathered her son.

Review by Louise Keller:
It's lightweight and reasonable likeable, but there's nothing special about this predictable rom com in which a single mother finds her son's sperm donor and then deliberates on the options that life offers. 'A child needs a father,' Eartha Kitt's mother states. 'I want a daddy,' Jeremy Gumb's six year old Jake insists. But Vanessa Williams' Julie is not convinced. After all, she has the perfect life. Or at least it looks that way, until the boat is rocked and she starts to question everything around her.

When Jake starts to have behavioural problems at school, Julie starts to ask what could be the causes. 'I picked good genes,' she insists to her theatre critic friend Stuart (Stephen Spinella), but he is less optimistic, suggesting her son's father might be a drug addict, an alcoholic... or god forbid, an actor! When Julie seeks him out with the help of a private eye, she discovers of course that he is indeed a lowly actor ('the only way I could feel better about me was to be someone else'), and one who is about to make his debut in an out of town production of "The Importance of Being Ernest". Michael Boatman is fine as Ted, Julie's always on the movie photographer boyfriend ('I don't want to die alone') and Kevin Daniels has plenty of spark as charismatic sperm donor Paul Cooper. Eartha Kitt is like a caricature of herself as Julie's matchmaking mother.

It's pretty clear where the story is headed, especially when Paul sleeps over after babysitting Jake, and he and Julie run lines together for Paul's upcoming role. Of course they kiss at the appropriate point. This is a mediocre New York story. There's nothing wrong with it, but there's nothing especially good about it. Just average fare for the undemanding.

Published November 13, 2008