Film

The Ladies Man (2000)

Director: Reginald Hudlin

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Leon Phelps (Meadows) hosts a late night radio talk show on sex. What with his minimal IQ, speech impediment and a free-associative style that makes Howard Stern sound like Frasier Crane, you might question his qualifications for the job - but as he says, 'I have done it to a lot of lay-dees!' His success with the fair sex is no mystery. It's not so much that his funky mid-'70s wardrobe makes them laugh (though that afro is probably part of it); rather, they love his confidence - and his enormous wang. Sophisticates may want to look elsewhere, but hell, we've seen worse and lived to smile about it. Meadows is a nine-year veteran of TV's Saturday Night Live, and this spin-off sticks close to the formula: take a tried-and- tested character (usually a socially incongruous innocent) and place him in barely linked, sketch-like scenes. Leon loses his job and is hunted by a group of cuckolded husbands (including Lee Evans), but you could probably move five minutes from the beginning to the end without anyone noticing. Is it funny? After I swallowed my disbelief and gave my critical faculties a break, yeah, I was tickled every 40 minutes or so. Is it sexist? Like Woody Allen said, 'It is if you're doing it right.'

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