2007 had an honored class of “pregnancy comedies” with Waitress, Knocked Up and Juno all earning accolades and big box office. So the arrival of Baby Mama in 2008 is not especially shocking… but it does sorta feels like the delinquent child who got held back. Most of the fault can be laid on first-time director Michael McCullers (who also wrote the film). McCullers shows little eye for visual composition and even less of a sense of comedic timing. He cuts at inappropriate times, leaves cutting room floor material scattered throughout and you remember those caricatures of human beings that I mentioned Forgetting Sarah Marshall managed to avoid? McCullers has a boatload of ‘em. Steve Martin’s health nut guru. The Lamaze teacher with a serious lisp. Sigourney Weaver’s surprisingly fertile owner of the surrogate mothers clinic. Even Amy Poehler herself plays a woman so stupidly vacant, I started to question whether she always has those glossed-over eyes or if she can just manage the same expression in every scene. McCullers previous screenplays, some of which I have been a fan of (Undercover Brother and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me), both took place in a kind of hyper-reality in which characters could act any which way they liked. Baby Mama makes it obvious then… he just hasn’t realized how to write real. At least Tina Fey gets out unscathed, mostly just mimicking her “30 Rock” character. She’s not a cartoon like the others, she’s just anal. And the film itself is not without some laughs – largely thanks to Greg Kinnear - but with a cast as talented as this that’s faint praise. The jokes don’t land nearly as often as you would want or expect. Had Tina Fey written the film herself, as she had with the surprisingly worthwhile Mean Girls, I feel like it would have suited her sense of humor better. Instead, only Dax Shephard seems really at home delivering the absurdist dialogue McCullers offers up (Dax apparently agrees with me that not enough people have seen his Idiocracy performance, because, this is it). Most of the time though, Baby Mama aims for the lowest common denominator humor. But it’s Kinnear who’s the only one here with a straight face… the only one who’s consistently sincere… and the one proving, yet again, the best jokes come from the actor who’s not afraid to be “real.” But what do I know? Amy Poehler peeing in the sink brought the house down.
2 comments:
I'm totally with you her Mulligan. This movie just wasn't that funny. It had its moments, but they were too few and far between. Tina Fey is a writer, first and foremost. She certainly has her charms and I like her alot, but she can only really do one role apparently. Poehler is one I'm hoping will get her big break into films, cuz she can be pretty damn funny, but this film won't be it I'm afraid. Though she did get my favorite line in the film though ("It feels like I'm shitting a knife!" I was dying from that one)
Otherwise though, it is a good cast that don't seem to understand what their motivations are. And the sudden twists were so easily predicted and just stupid. Add a rushed ending and you got a poor flick. A real disappointment for me. I had hopes. But than again I thought Fey wrote it. Clearly that would have been a better film at least.
UM hello do you live in a box this movie was halerious funniest thing ive seen in a long time you people need to get out more and get off ya fat behinds and stop whinging!
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