JOHN ANDERSON - MOVIE REVIEWS: BABY MAMA

Former Saturday Night Live players Tina Fey and Amy Poehler go to the movies with Baby Mama in which Fey's character hires Poehler's as a surrogate mother while she tends to her career. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times suggests that the movie is "sitcom functional, " but that "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." Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times reacts similarly. The movie, she writes , "hardly allows itself any sharp moments at all -- it's 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." John Anderson in Newsday is not so generous, writing that the movie seems "mild to the point of pabulum, taking a pretty fertile topic -- surrogate motherhood -- and making it inoffensive to anyone." He then quickly adds, "This is not an endorsement." And Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune thinks the entire project may have been calculated by media planners. He writes: "Every moment of this project feels beat-driven, focus-grouped and designed to package Fey as a viable movie star with great pins (as one character takes pains to note) to go with the breasts (ditto). This isn't writing, it's advertising."

25/04/2008