Raising Helen review

Raising Helen could have been an excellent film by any standards, but it was too long and alot of time was wasted on unnecessary shots of family time and their issues.

I felt like I was running in circles alot of the movie and I can't believe that the actors didn't feel the same way too.

The story is about Helen Harris (Kate Hudson) one of 3 sisters who has the single life down pat and she loves it. When her oldest sister dies and leaves her 3 children to Helen, all hell breaks loose. Helen must figure out how to take care of these kids and manage her life around them.

It starts off great and you are amazed at how fast she gets this done but then there are minute issues that she tends to overlook and her sister, Jenny (Joan Cusack) ends up having to bail her out alot of the time.

Then, there is Helen's romance with Pastor Dan (John Corbett - fine fatty hotty) and I can actually believe in some way that these two people could be attracted to each other, but not for the reasons that they exhibit in this movie. I find Hudson's character although willing to give up her life for the kids and take care of them, strangely still very self-centered and living in some kind of la-la land.

Pastor Dan doesn't have much personality either, if I do say so myself.

There are a couple of funny parts in the movie, like when the next door neighbor is recruited by Helen (yet again) to help her out by getting some hoodlum kids out of her house when the oldest child (who looks like a minature version of Hudson and its kind of creepy considering she is 15 and is kinda slutty) throws a party and she wields a steel baseball bat like a pro.

But other than that I would give this flick a pass until it comes out on video, its about 2.5 hours long.

Unless its a period piece or literary masterpiece, no movie has the right to be that long, certainly not a comedy-drama that is more comedy than dramatic.