09/22/2008
DVD:: 0 comments: by Amanda Rush
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler bring on the chick answer to buddy comedy flicks in Baby Mama.
Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey) is a woman surrounded by babies - just not her own. Though plagued by a terrible desire to have children, Kate sees them everywhere she goes. An executive at a Whole Foods like chain, Kate always put her career before her personal life and now at 37 finds herself without a husband, without any children and with a ticking time bomb of a biological clock.
So Kate decides to take the plunge herself. One problem - it seems that she can’t get pregnant, no matter what she tries. Enter Angie (Poehler), an employee of a posh surrogate mommy company. Angie is everything Kate is not. Her life is plagued by a loser of a boyfriend (Dax Shepard), she’s utterly unsuccessful at everything, and is a total slob. With her options limited, Kate decides to give Angie a go, and a (pseudo) friendship is born - until Angie shows up on her doorstep a few weeks later, having broken up with her boyfriend and no place to live, pregnant with Kate’s child.
Kate lets Angie crash at her meticulously clean and eco friendly apartment, and so an odd couple is born. Where Kate is utterly self sufficient and organized, Angie is a wreck, who forces Kate to look after her much like she would a child. The situation is a nightmare at first, but slowly the two come to be friends, until a wrench is thrown into the works by Angie’s ex-boyfriend.
Fey and Poehler are brilliant together. The Saturday Night Live alums work together so well that their pairing is completely natural in how funny it is. The film also features Greg Kinnear as Kate’s love interest, Sigourney Weaver as the oddly fertile owner of the surrogate mom firm and a brilliantly funny Steve Martin as Kate’s bizarre new-age utterly green boss.
The film does something I haven’t seen a DVD do since Dangerous Beauty - it is printed on both sides (one side wide screen, one side full screen). There are different bonus features on each side, so all of you widescreen snobs out there (it’s okay to speak up, I’m one of you), you’ll have to go through both sides to get all the bonuses.
And what might those bonuses be? An alternate ending, deleted scenes, a featurette called “Satrday Night Live Legacy of Laughter” and “From Conception to Delivery : The Making of Baby Mama”. Commentary is also provided by Poehler, Fey and Michael McCullers, writer and director.
This is a funny film. I can’t say it enough - this is a funny film. The supporting parts are fantastic, and Fey and Poehler are a comedic dream team. I hope that this is the beginning of, as they say, a beautiful friendship. Though typically, men rule the world of the buddy comedy, these two ladies make a fantastic film from our side of the genitals that not only doesn’t alienate the male audience, it works the genre amazingly.