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The comedy "it" girl of the moment, Tina Fey, is riding high with the critical acclaim for her hit NBC TV show, "30 Rock." She was also the brains behind "Mean Girls," possibly the best Lindsay Lohan film yet.
With the new movie "Baby Mama," Fey teamed up with fellow "Saturday Night Live" star, the bubbly Amy Poehler. The result is a predictable yarn that makes Fey and Poehler look like "Sex and the City" cast rejects.
Indeed, "Baby Mama" is a collage of ideas taken from previous films. Part "The Odd Couple," part "Baby Boom," with a good enough storyline that will make the career-driven Carrie Bradshaw and her "Sex and the City" pals proud.
Fey stars as Kate Holbrook, a successful and single businesswoman who finally decides to have a kid on her own. Recently promoted as the vice president of the Round Earth Organic Market, Kate is beginning to experience latent maternal instincts.
But Kate's plan to become a single mom is derailed when her pregnancy tests turn negative at a reliable sperm bank. So she visits a surrogate center where Chaffee Bicknell (a surprising comedic role for Sigourney Weaver) arranges for her to meet a potential surrogate, Poehler's Angie Ostrowiski, a white-trash baby mama.
Upon learning that Angie is pregnant, Kate goes into precision nesting mode reading childcare books, baby-proofing the apartment, and researching top pre-schools. But there's only one problem the now-pregnant Angie has no place to live.
This is the part where "The Odd Couple" kicks in. Katie and Angie become Felix and Oscar. One's a slob, the other's meticulous, and so on and so forth. And yes, this is the exact moment of the film when we can pretty much predict what's going to happen.
Written and directed by Michael McCullers, the writer behind all the "Austin Powers" films, and produced by "Saturday Night Live" creator, Lorne Michaels, "Baby Mama" is entertaining enough, but the script fails to be smart and witty elements needed for a genre film like this to truly work!
But the cast seemed to have a good time, specially Steve Martin as Kate's boss, and Greg Kinear as her love interest, even though his part is miserably underwritten.
"Baby Mama" is the kind of film you may want to see on a Sunday afternoon when you want a quicker picker upper to prepare you for the week. It's funny in some parts, and the pacing is brisk enough to make us forget some plotholes, but in the end, you will be wishing that the film is intelligent and self-deprecating enough, much like its female lead, Tina Fey. And for that, Baby Mama gets 2 surrogate mother kisses
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