About wessingleton
Location: Irving TX
Occupation: Movie Critic/Financial Services/Corporate Trainer/Speaker
Bio: Wes Singleton is a part-time movie critic residing in Irving, TX. He has a variety of different hobbies and interests, including movies, writing and running. He works full-time at a large non-profit financial services company but his real passion is movies. He has his own website, www.moviereviewsbywes.com that provides an outlet for this passion.
Posts: 41
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Regardless of your hormone level, Baby Mama delivers some decent laughs.
Baby Mama delivers an official movie star to the world: Tina Fey. Coupled with her success from the small screen in Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock (not to mention a recent red-hot Entertainment Weekly cover), Fey arrives as a full-fledged cinema diva in her own right, albeit a bookish one. Her movie, Baby Mama is a wryly humorous, charming and sometimes extremely funny comedy. The only thing in Fey’s way here is a thin, strained script and co-star Amy Poehler, nearly stealing the movie with its funniest moments.
The premise is simple enough. Fey is very successful and very single businesswomen Kate Holbrook, who’s 37 and sacrificed a family for a career with a Whole Foods-type of supermarket. She finds herself getting older, her biological clock ticking and desperately craving a family. She finally decides to have a baby via surrogate mother, an expensive and timely process. Holbrook’s surrogate mother turns out to be the colorful but street-wise Angie (Poehler), which gives Angie the chance to start a new life for herself and her lowlife boyfriend Carl (Dax Shepard). After Carl and Angie have a falling out, Angie shows up on Kate’s door, and the two end up living together Odd Couple style with the energetic but messy Angie and the uptight, structured Kate. They have to figure out how to get along long enough to make the perfect family.
Baby Mama is better and funnier than I expected, though it’s not as smart or original as Fey’s 30 Rock. A spotty, draggy exposition gives way to a peppier, predictable last act with most of the laughs. It’s filled with too many stock characters it doesn’t know what to do with, and Odd Couple-esque humor is often too contrived. The reason - Fey left the directing and writing to former Saturday Night Live writer Michael McCullers – a baffling move given Fey’s writing talent. It lacks some of the sharp wit of her writing, and her character here, that of a nerdish executive, is really just another version of 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon. The thinness of Baby Mama’s script and its redundancies grow too tiresome by the end, so you’re ready for that baby to pop out.
Fey and Baby Mama are fortunate to have the colorfully witty Poehler, likely in her last Saturday Night Live season and destined for full stardom herself, as Angie, who provides the movie with its best comical moments. When Kate drags her into the shower after learning she’s using chemical-laced hair products, she shouts “Help me, I’m clean!” Or her cries of “Me” when asked who’ll use drugs in their pregnancy and her funniest scene, her delivery scene in the hospital. In another funny exchange, “Did you just stick your gum under my table?” Kate asks. “I dunno…maybe you did,” Angie retorts. The whole Fey-Poehler chemistry is just as memorable as their time together as SNL’s news team.
Most of Baby Mama’s oversized cast works well . Steve Martin, as an ex-hippie businessman and Weeds Romany Malco, as Kate’s doorman, are the most memorable (Martin could do almost anything and still be funny) but not everyone is as successful. As the businesswoman who provides Kate with surrogacy, Sigourney Weaver has the script’s most awkwardly unfunny role as a 50’s woman giving birth to babies herself. Not to mention it’s just a little darn icky, and even Kate finally says: “Ewww.” (Weaver’s intended to be icky, but still not funny.) Holland Taylor, Dax Shepard, Maura Tierney and Greg Kinnear all are underused and most of whom, especially Kinnear and Tierney, seem as afterthoughts.
Baby Mama at times tries too hard to be both smart and funny, when it should just loosen up a bit and provide more zany Will Ferrell-esque moments along the way. I’d like to know how all of this would’ve come out had Fey herself had written it. It certainly wouldn’t have the overly sweet, upbeat end credits we’re treated to with all the babies and young ones running around.
We know that most babies are cute, giggly and funny, but sometimes a little awkward and messy, which could certainly describe Baby Mama. One thing’s for sure, it gives birth to movie star Fey, who’ll likely conceive even funnier projects than this.
