Baby Mama

Yeeaaahhhh.....I saw this one. At least I got paid for it. It needed to be screened at my theater so I took the plunge. My wife had some interest in it, so she joined me. But as awful as the trailers for this looked, there were moments where I was cracking up. It is not completely devoid of comedy but it's main problem was the funny jokes were too few and far between. It makes for a really bad laugh ratio when a movie is an hour and a half and I only laughed 6 or 7 times.

Baby Mama stars Tina Fey as Kate Holbrook and Amy Poehler as Angie Ostrowiski. Kate wants a baby but can't get pregnant so she goes through a surrogacy program run by Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver) and ends up paying Angie to be the surrogate mother for her child. Not that much of a plot involved, we just get to watch all of the shenanigans involving Kate, Angie, and the various side characters. One of the highlights was Steve Martin as a hippie version of Tim Robbins' Ian from High Fidelity. Sadly, his character was overused and became annoying after 10 minutes of screen time. There was also Dax Shepard playing Carl, Angie's common law husband, who made for some good laughs. And there are a couple of nice cameos involving Jon Glaser and Fred Armisen, but neither of them really have much to work with.

Being a movie about a woman who wants to get pregnant but can't, this is obviously geared towards woman. However, I wouldn't classify this as a chick flick. It's just the subject matter that's feminine, it's not overly mushy or lovey or any of the other words typically ascribed to chick flicks. It's just a comedy. But, comedies are supposed to be funny. You know, the audience is supposed to laugh. So that's the problem with Baby Mama. I didn't laugh enough for me to consider it a successful comedy. Yes, there were moments of near genius, but they weren't able to keep it up for the whole movie. Then again, we shouldn't be too surprised when the movie is written and directed by Michael McCullers, the guy who wrote the Austin Powers movies.