Baby Mama

A huge thank you to Debbie who gave Amanda passes to the premiere and festival and to Amanda who shared them with me. This is my favorite time of year and there is no better way to spend the first beautiful weeks of spring in the city!

The 2008 Tribeca Film Festival opened last night with the world premiere of the movie Baby Mama. Every year the festival has a more main stream, big budget film premiere and it’s not necessarily a coveted spot. In 2007, the painful film Lucky You had this honor and in 2006, Mission Impossible III under impressed its first audience at Tribeca. Baby Mama fell well above these two films and was an enjoyable hour and a half. But an enjoyable passage of time is about the best one can say about Baby Mama.

With an incredible cast and the two smartest female comedians of this generation of SNL, it’s hard to understand why the film just wasn’t that funny. As involved as Tina Fey has been in her last two projects (30 Rock and Mean Girls), starring in the film wasn’t enough to make it a Tina Fey success. The writer and director Michael McCullers (who’s previous credits include Austin Powers films), satisfy the comedic powers of Tina Fey and Amy Pohler. There were a few funny moments and the audience was forced into the position of a live laugh track; we knew we should laugh but also that if we were watching this at home not much of it would make us actually laugh out loud.

The above-mentioned incredible cast played a wide variety of ridiculously stereotyped characters. There was Steve Martin who played a hippie businessman and yes in fact did run a natural foods company, have waist long hair, meditate, and do yoga. Romany Malco (best known as Conrad from the show Weeds) played a typified black doorman and was, of course, the one to bring up the phrase “baby mama”. Amy Pohler was white trash, and stupid along with her common law dead beat white trash husband, and in a moment of dramatic confrontation, Tina Fey’s successful businesswoman character hurtfully calls Amy Pohler white trash!

All in all, the movie was more poignant than expected but also completely predictable from the half way point. Tina Fey fans will still want to see it but will quickly realize that Baby Mama is not as smart as Mean Girls and not as funny as 30 Rock.