Just Wright (Fox Searchlight Pictures, Flavor Unit Entertainment, Dune Entertainment, 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 2) my husband Charles and I watched two Lifetime movies, both romantic comedies featuring mostly African-American casts. The first was called Just Wright, made for theatrical release by Fox Searchlight Pictures in 2010 and starring Queen Latifah and Common in a film directed by Sanaa Hamri (a Black woman, by the way) from a script by Michael Elliot. Hamri actually has 62 directorial credits on imdb.com, though most are for TV episodes or music videos. Physical trainer and therapist Leslie Wright (Queen Latifah) falls in love with NBA basketball star Scott McKnight (Common, who looks surprisingly credible as an athlete). Leslie has a job at a local hospital in New Jersey and is a huge fan of the New Jersey Nets (who relocated to New York City and became the Brooklyn Nets in 2012, two years after this film was made). She’s living with her parents Lloyd (James Pickens, Jr.) and Janice (the marvelous Pam Grier, the Blaxploitation queen of the 1970’s who’s more heavy-set than she was in her glory days but still is an authoritative actress) and also with her lifelong friend Morgan Alexander (Paula Patton). The two are described as “god-sisters” and friends since childhood, and Leslie is putting Morgan up, presumably rent-free, in the guest room of her parents’ home. Leslie is determined to see Morgan get a normal job, but instead Morgan is intent on landing a well-to-do athlete as a sort of trophy husband who will take care of her the rest of their lives. Leslie thinks she has her chance when Scott McKnight invites both her and Morgan to a party at his palatial home, and Morgan makes a bee-line for Scott. Leslie and Scott had met at a gas station when Leslie, driving home in her beat-up off-orange 1960’s Ford Mustang she nicknamed “Eleanor” after her late grandmother, whose car it had been, pulls in for gas and spots Scott nonplussed when he can’t find the gas cap on the brand-new sleek black car he’d just bought.

Leslie figures out where it would be and the two bond over a Joni Mitchell CD she spotted on the seat of Scott’s car. The two praise the record Mitchell made with jazz great Charles Mingus (actually, as I pointed out in posts on a 2009 Lifetime movie that mentioned this project, The Party Never Stops [https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/08/party-never-stops-jaffebraunstein-films.html], Mitchell and Mingus never recorded together; they had planned an album together and even collaborated on writing songs for it, but Mingus died before the project could be made and the resulting Mingus album contained three songs they wrote together, one – “Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat” – a Mitchell lyric to a pre-existing Mingus composition, and two others Mitchell wrote after Mingus’s death, one of which was a tribute to him), and ultimately Queen Latifah and Common get to sing a nice short duet on the Harry Warren song “The More I See You” from the 1945 movie Diamond Horseshoe. (The gimmick is that Scott has a secret room in his house, and just when we’re thinking of Bluebeard’s Castle here, it turns out that the big secret is the room contains a piano on which he secretly practices – and it’s lovely to hear two people who started out as rappers turn out to have quite lovely singing voices.) The film turns when Scott’s ankle gets seriously injured during the NBA All-Star Game, and Morgan, his fiancée, gets jealous of the white therapist, Bella Goldsmith (Kim Strother), whom Scott has hired on the recommendation of the NBA but who seems to be interested in getting a lot more intimately physical with Scott than her job requires. Morgan asks Leslie to take over as Scott’s therapist, and Leslie puts Scott through an eight-week regimen after warning him, “You’re going to hate me by the time this is over.”

When the sports shows on TV start reporting rumors that the Nets won’t re-sign Scott after his current contract ends with the current season because they don’t think he’ll be able to play at his former standard, Morgan sends Scott a letter breaking up with him. Leslie gets Scott rehabilitated enough to start the seventh game of the East Coast round of the playoffs, and he performs miserably until Leslie gets him a pep talk at halftime and it rouses his self-confidence until he plays at his old level again. (Stop me if you’ve heard this before.) The Nets win the playoff game and advance to the championship round, and Scott goes on sports TV and gives an interview in which he gives Leslie credit for his rehabilitation. This starts a bidding war between the Nets and several other NBA teams for her services as a trainer. Just then, with Scott seemingly on the road back to a major recovery and a lucrative contract, Morgan (ya remember Morgan?) comes slamming back into his life and offers to pick up where he left off. Meanwhile, Scott and Leslie have had sex, albeit just once, though when Morgan returns Leslie feels she’s going to be demoted to the “friend zone.” Ultimately, though, Scott sees through Morgan’s gold-digging antics and decides that Leslie is the woman he really loves, and he swoops down on her while she’s in Philadelphia interviewing for the 76’ers. The two get married, and there’s a Lifetime-style title reading “One Year Later.” One year later they’re in the middle of a Nets game in which Scott is playing, Leslie is sitting with the team as their trainer, and Morgan, by Leslie’s special dispensation, is sitting in the area of the arena usually reserved for the players’ wives. Just Wright is a pretty typical romantic comedy, and Lifetime appears to have been showing it (after another Queen Latifah theatrical feature, Beauty Shop), to promote the fact that they’ve recently acquired rerun rights to her CBS-TV action series, The Equalizer (in which she repeated a role originally written for Denzel Washington in a theatrical film). But within the confines of the genre it was a nice theatrical romp.