 Movie
Reviews
with Evelyn Gough
Raising Helen
Directed by Garry Marshall
 The new family - (left to right) Audrey (Hayden Panettiere), Sarah (Abigail Breslin), Helen (Kate Hudson), and Henry (Spencer Breslin) - enjoy a day in New York.
Veteran director Garry Marshall is best known for his mega hits Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride and if you were a fan of those movies I can pretty much guarantee you'll adore his latest romantic comedy Raising Helen.
It stars the bubbly and oh-so-cute Kate Hudson (daughter of the equally bubbly Goldie Hawn) as Helen Harris, a single girl living the single girl's dream. She has the dream job working as an assistant in a successful modelling agency, she has the dream apartment in the heart of New York, she gets to date gorgeous male models and her shoes are to-die-for.
But all this changes when her sister and brother-in-law (Felicity Huffman, Sean O'Bryan) are killed in a car crash. To Helen's utter amazement she learns that she is to become guardian to the couple's three children, Audrey (Hayden Panettiere), Henry (Spencer Breslin) and Sarah (Abigail Breslin).
She's not the only one who is surprised. Helen's older sister Jenny (Joan Cusack) is the epitome of the perfect Mum. She has the Mum hair, the sensible Mum shoes, the 2.5 kids. In fact she's Super Mum and can't understand why she was not entrusted to care for the orphaned children. (Me neither, to be honest, except that there wouldn't have been any movie and what a tragedy that would have been.)
Anyway it's not long before Helen's perfect world begins to fall apart. Instead of sleeping with studly men she finds herself sharing her bed with three squirming kids and six smelly feet, her work starts to suffer and the only guy hitting on her is a pudgy Lutheran pastor (John Corbett). What's a girl to do?
Like I said, if you love Garry Marshall's previous work then its no biggie to guess you'll also enjoy Raising Helen.
This is a no-brainer that looks pretty thanks to its vivacious star and it gains some depth due to the presence of Joan Cusack but personally it didn't do it for me. Call me strange but I like my romantic comedies to be romantic and, shock, horror, funny! The most interesting characters were bit players Hector Elizondo and Sakina Jaffrey. And Hollywood, we have a problem when we don't want the leading man to get naked! Ouch!
Ok, I have a confession to make. Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride are two of my least favourite movies of all time so I went into Raising Helen with extremely low expectations. And no, I wasn't pleasantly surprised, it was as trite and predictable as I anticipated.
But that's just me. I'm sure plenty of people will love this movie. If you're one of them, enjoy.
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