Things I Learned Watching "Baby Mama"

It's been a good few months since I saw this, so bear with me.

• Dear Maura Tierney: I read an interview with you in Entertainment Weekly (I think) sometime back in which you revealed yourself to be an irreverent, swaggering tomboy in the Kim Deal mold. So why don't you ever take acting roles that reflect who you are? How come you're always in the lame wifee/mother/love-interest/wishy-washy parts? Why do you settle? I'm sure the money's great for this sort of thing, but look, ER's gonna be over in a year, you're gonna need an income source, and it's high time you really tackled something challenging and meaty. Life's too short to keep settling for bullshit that's beneath you, like that insipid Welcome to Mooseport flick that was beneath everybody involved.




• Dear Holland Taylor: must you always be a drunkard or evil or annoying or an evil annoying drunkard when you sign on to projects? Really? It's on your resume? You have it added to your contracts? Oh, okay. Note: I seriously thought you were Francis Fisher! My bad.




• Yeah, it's sorta heterosexually suspect to be a single dude in your 30s running a smoothie shop named Super Fruity with a logo featuring a suggestively-peeled banana. Especially if you look exactly like Greg Kinnear. That's amusing! But not that amusing.




• Who knew that Sigorney Weaver and Steve Martin were capable, at this stage in their long careers, at stealing a movie from Tina Fey without breaking a sweat? Not I, certainly.




• Dear God: please never, ever allow Amy Poehler to don a tank top onscreen again. That's all.




• Dax Shepard/Romany Malco spin-off now. Now!




• Baby Mama's best trick is it's sneakiness, it's willingness to move in a sort of low-key stealth mode in which the gags come along one after another without calling a lot of attention to themselves - a lost art in the boys-mostly, boisterous Atapow age. You settle into the movie's absurd-but-not-totally buddy-picture rhythm, and sometimes you're surprised, but the general energy isn't manic enough to make it seem as though time's flying by. So we're lulled, we're comfortable, we're supine - until the baby shower scene where Fey's character utters two noxious words that remind us what this movie's really about and sorta jolts us out of our stupors. No spoilers from me; you'll know what I mean when it happens, and it will catch you off-guard.




• Wow. I thought I'd have a lot more to say about this one, but I'm out; I've got nothing else.