Baby Mama.

"Baby Mama may be Tina Fey's first starring big-screen role, but what it desperately needs more of isn't Fey the smart, self-deprecating comedian but Fey the sharp, witty writer, as this snoozer from Michael McCullers (scribe of all three Austin Powers movies) is as pedestrian and middling as they come," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"Forget the title, the target audience, and the taglines: what fuels Baby Mama is not the eternal quest for motherhood, or the topical conflict between parenting and careers, but an old-fashioned scuffle over class," writes David Denby in the New Yorker.

Updated through 4/26.

"Baby Mama keeps the laughs coming, mainly from the horror that Kate and Angie [Amy Poehler] experience over the other's excesses, but also through amusingly eccentric supporting characters like Steve Martin as Kate's kajillionaire tree-hugger boss and Greg Kinnear's independent smoothie maker with a hatred for Jamba Juice," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "Even when the movie gets bogged down in plot - Angie fakes being pregnant, but then it turns out that she is, but the baby may actually be Carl's - the zingers keep coming and the characters maintain a sense of being both cartoony and realistic."

S James Snyder, writing in the New York Sun, finds the film "sweeter and smarter than many will be expecting... The obvious rapport shared by Ms Fey and Ms Poehler makes for a feel-good formula, but not a lazy one."

"It can be difficult to determine where we are currently in the whole can-women-be-funny? debate other than to say there have been a spate of essays on the topic," writes Paul Brownfield in a Los Angeles Times piece before segueing into his meeting with Fey and Poehler. "The Times' movie critic Carina Chocano recently noted how 'the girl' and 'the hot girl' have merged into one abject role for women in studio comedies. Last year, Vanity Fair published agent provocateur Christopher Hitchens's essay 'Why Women Aren't Funny,' though the April magazine featured an essay by New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley going the other way, highlighting the bumper crop of women writing as well as performing their comedy, mostly on TV."

And the comedy will open Tribeca tomorrow.

Updates, 4/23: Julia Wallace talks with Poehler for the Voice.

"Baby Mama is less about conception-mania - or the stage that invariably follows it, baby obsession - than it is a romantic comedy, a picture about two people who fall into a kind of love with one another only to fall out, ultimately finding a deeper, or at least more realistic, connection after they've reckoned with each other's flaw," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "But even if the picture is softer than it needs to be, it still resists devolving into something warm and squishy."

Update, 4/24: "Baby Mama is the most disappointing movie of the year so far - which, granted, isn't saying a lot in mid-April," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. It's "a politely bland retread of women's-movie clichés a generation old: the driven businesswoman who puts off motherhood till the last minute, then pursues it with type-A zeal; the guy who flees a first date when babies are mentioned; the down-to-earth potential boyfriend (Greg Kinnear) who, by his very existence, reminds the overly ambitious heroine of what really matters in life. Look, I have fond enough memories of Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard in Baby Boom, but that was more than 20 years ago. Have our ideas about working, parenting, and the formation of alternative families really changed so little since 1987?"

Updates, 4/26: "The film never comes fully to term, as it were: the visual style is sitcom functional, and even the zippiest jokes fall flat because of poor timing," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But, much like the prickly, talented Ms Fey, it pulls you in with a provocative and, at least in current American movies, unusual mix of female intelligence, awkwardness and chilled-to-the-bone mean."

The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday notes that the movie "ambles along with such low-key, easygoing humor that it's almost a shock to the system: Where are the hamburger phones, the rat-a-tat pop culture references, the porn? All have been left behind in the service of what is a far more observant, if uneven, comedy of 21st-century manners."

The Los Angeles Times' Carina Chocano finds the film "much too sweet-natured to be cruel, and much too cheerful to be angry. It probably could have pushed a few more buttons, but Baby Mama aims to please and succeeds."

"When a member of Judd Apatow's extended comedy troupe pops up on screen, the audience claps and laughs out of sheer anticipation," notes Ryan Stewart in Premiere. "When a member of Lorne Michaels's does so, it's tumbleweeds, which is symptomatic of the larger problems at work in Baby Mama, an exhausting 90 minutes of SNL-centric mediocrity that gives one the nagging feeling that Tina Fey's inability to cut the cord is going to quickly start to cool interest in her upcoming projects.... Cut the cord, Tina. Cut the cord."

"Memo to smart, funny TV stars in smart, funny TV shows: When you take similar wares to the big screen and expect me to pay full ticket price to follow you there, I'd better laugh at least as hard as I did at home," writes Mike Russell. "Baby Mama, I'm sad to say, is just sporadically funny, bland, talent-wasting junk."

"It's an Odd Coupling that, while conventional in conception, is exceptionally executed by Fey and Poehler, firmly in their respective comedic comfort zones of wry vulnerability and barely restrained derangement," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "Though Baby Mama is being billed as a gal-friendly counterpart to the male-centric lens of the Apatow Industry, it doesn't try as hard or scratch as deep as the latter's better efforts, in ways both good and bad."

Richard Corliss in Time: "Oscar and Felix; Kate and Angie. I'm not making claims that Baby Mama transcends the format's routine progressions - opposites not only attract, they learn from each other - only that, within these conventions, the movie is smart, funny and beguiling."

"[T]he upshot, and upside, of Baby Mama is that Ms Poehler and Ms Fey should pair up for another movie that gives freer rein to their talents," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun.

"Baby Mama doesn't have a plot so much as a series of contrivances that play out completely as expected. It's not without laughs - Poehler and Fey, as ever, have strong chemistry, and there's a truly bizarre scene in which Martin offers Fey a strange 'reward' for a job well done - but there's a lot of arid space between them," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

"The movie is what it is, but I must confess that for all the by-the-numbers plotting and utterly conventional turns of the plot, there’s a dynamic between stars Amy Poehler and Tina Fey that both lifts the comedy and grounds the characters in ways that made the film better than it should be," writes Sean Axmaker.

And finally for now, a moment of brilliance from C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark that I'm pointing to from this entry and from Harold and Kumar's.

Posted by dwhudson at April 22, 2008 6:35 AM