Just Wright

[Hot Ptah]

Has anyone else seen the new Hollywood romantic comedy, Just Wright, starring Queen Latifah? Jazz figures prominently in the film.

Queen Latifah plays a physical therapist who meets an NBA superstar, the two time league MVP from the New Jersey Nets (it's fiction), at a gas station, and they bond over talking about Joni Mitchell's album with Charles Mingus.

Later Queen Latifah moves into the NBA superstar's mansion to give him intensive physical therapy for his injured knee. There is a door which he keeps locked at all times and which no one is allowed to go into. We learn later in the film that the mysterious room contains a Steinway piano on which the NBA superstar plays jazz. The room is decorated with classic album cover posters, some from the Blue Note label, John Coltrane's "Lush Life" album, etc.

Queen Latifah enters the room, expresses positive feelings about jazz and the NBA guy's playing, and sings the song he is playing on his piano. Later on, the thinner, cuter woman who is Queen Latifah's rival for this guy, asks him to close the door so that she doesn't have to hear his jazz piano playing. She has no interest or feeling for jazz, his passion. This is meant as a clear signal that she is not right for him.

I can't remember another light Hollywood film in recent years in which jazz was presented as something so positive, with no derisive remarks about it at all.

[Hot Ptah]

Oh yes, I almost forgot. Jazz also figures into the first date between the NBA superstar and Queen Latifah. He takes her to a small club in which Terrance Blanchard is playing. This is presented as a highly prized, and nearly impossible, task to pull off. He comments that he was able to get them in only because he "knows people." She is highly impressed.

If only it was that way in real life.