Baby Mama (***)

Even as unwed motherhood is declining in the US, it’s becoming a minor epidemic in American cinemas. Unlike some of her on-screen sisters, Tina Fey’s character has been trying to get pregnant, but that hasn’t worked out. Enter Amy Poehler as the surrogate she hires, via an agency. There’s a slight parallel with Helen Hunt’s character in Then She Found Me (released a week later), who’s also nearing 40 and wants a biological child. However, the better parallel is to Knocked Up, in which Seth Rogen’s underachiever tries to mesh with the professional gal he’s impregnated. Baby Mama, a directorial debut for Austin Powers co-writer Michael McCuller, is less funny, but part of what both movies are about is class. At first blush, it seems like the Poehler character will simply be a crass and nutrition-averse pox on health-food exec Fey’s snooty Philadelphia house. Theirs is a forced marriage without the sex. But that only forms part of the story; both characters are sympathetic, making Poehler a female counterpart to Rogen, not Adam Sandler. Supporting characters account for some of the funnier parts, including Dax Shepard as Poehler’s low-life boyfriend, and Sigourney Weaver as the over-50, yet infuriatingly fertile, operator of the surrogate agency. Some romantic comedy elements come courtesy of Greg Kinnear, whose regular-guy vibe is a match for emerging star Fey.

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viewed 5/3/08

Children of Men (**1/2)

 ? It is the year 2027, and the world has fallen into chaos and despair in the wake of the global infertility epidemic that has prevented any woman from giving birth in the last 18 years. Only Britain has retained some semblance of a functional society, and even then it has resorted to harshly punitive conditions for refugees, and violent thugs roam about. Our hero (Clive Owen) is contacted by a long-lost girlfriend (Julianne Moore) who embroils him in the struggles of a refugee-rights group branded as terrorists by the government, and with little notice he becomes the savior for the human race’s future.

+ This is a fascinating premise. How would people react to the idea that humanity might end? The last segment, set in a refugee camp where the inmates are in open warfare with the state, is suitably horrific and best depicts the movie’s answer to that question. Injecting a helpful dose of levity to the movie is Michael Caine, an offbeat but loyal friend of the savior.

- I love science-fiction that’s about ideas, not simply high-tech action, I loved screenwriter-director Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También, and I’m a fan of P.D. James, the author of the 1992 novel on which this is based. But there’s something very flat about this movie. Its depiction of a near-joyless future didn’t ring true to me, and that’s partly because it’s not well explained. What James’s novel does that this film doesn’t is show what happened in the years after the last babies are born. Perhaps Cuarón felt that there wasn’t time for this in a two-hour movie, but what the story boils down to is really a very long chase sequence set in a future police state. There’s enough character development that it’s a little more than that, but only a little. There is talk of something called The Human Project that the main characters are trying to reach, but we don’t know much about it. Are there others like Owens character? We don’t know. In short, we know very few of the details that might help render this dystopian future more comprehensible, complex, and compelling.

= **1/2 It wouldn’t be fair to call this movie slow-moving, but I would call it monotonous, visually and narratively. Watch it if you want to see what a world gone to hell might look like, but not if you want to see how it might get there.