Saturday Night Live alumni Tina Fey and Amy Poehler star in writer-director Michael McCullers' Baby Mama, in which Fey is well cast as Kate Holbrook, a single career woman who longs for a baby but fails to conceive after artificial insemination. Increasingly desperate and unwilling to undertake the lengthy, tedious process of adoption, Kate elects to hire a surrogate mother and settles—somewhat apprehensively—on a none-too-bright working-class woman named Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler). When the baby mama's good-for-nothing husband (Dax Shepard) becomes unreasonable, Angie moves into Kate's ritzy apartment. The complexities of this unorthodox living arrangement, coupled with Kate's growing exasperation with Angie, provide ample opportunities for humor, but the script just isn't as pointed as it should be, forcing Fey and Poehler to rely on their personalities and well-honed comic timing to generate laughs. The first-rate supporting cast includes Greg Kinnear, Steve Martin, Sigourney Weaver, and Maura Tierney. An often pleasant and innocuous film likely to appeal to fans of the two leads, this is a strong optional purchase. [Note: DVD extras include both widescreen and full screen versions on the same disc, audio commentary (by writer-director Michael McCullers, producer Lorne Michaels, and costars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler), the 10-minute “making-of” featurette “From Conception to Delivery,” seven minutes of deleted scenes, a four-minute “Saturday Night Live: Legacy of Laughter” featurette, a three-minute alternate ending, and trailers. Bottom line: a solid extras package for an uneven but occasionally winning comedy.] (E. Hulse)
Baby Mama
Universal, 99 min., PG-13, DVD: $29.99, Blu-ray: $39.99, Sept. 9 Volume 23, Issue 4
Baby Mama
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