Anyhoo, I didn't write a review of Forgetting Sarah Marshall but I'll say now that I thought it was very good which makes this an amazing situation where I see good comedies two weeks in a row. There is simply no movie genre harder to pull off than the comedy, a statement proven when so many of them end up sucking. I go into a comedy assuming it's going to be the cinematic version of feces coated slime monster that crawled out of the bowels of hell to wreak havoc on all that is good and holy. I'll usually give it points if it's coated with just a little bit of feces and only wreaks havoc on the good, skipping the holy.
Baby Mama is not as good as Sarah Marshall but it's way the hell better than my "feces covered monster" standard. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler make a great comedy team. I've seen some people compare them to Lucy and Ethel but in this case The Odd Couple is a better comparison. Tina Fey (in my opinion, one of the funniest people currently living) plays Kate, a woman in her late 30s who put off starting a family to advance her career as vice president of an organic foods company. At age 37, she realizes that she'd best have a baby before she gets too old to pick it up but discovers that, due to her narcissistic mother's use of dangerous liver spot medication while pregnant with Kate, her chances of conceiving a child are almost impossible. Thus, after discovering that it would take years before an adoption could be finalized, she decides to hire a surrogate mother. Enter Amy Poehler's character, Angie. Angie somehow managed to pass the background checks of the surrogacy agency that Kate hired despite the fact that she and her husband are uncouth, immature, dimwits who con and hustle their way through life and are just doing this for the massive amount of money that Kate is willing to pay to rent out her uterus. From there, hilarity ensues.
One thing that Baby Mama has in common with Sarah Marshall is that they both have great supporting characters so the movie isn't 100% dependent on Fey and Poehler for laughs. A good opposite example is Wedding Crashers. Except for a few lines from Isla Fisher's crazy girls character, almost all the laughs in that movie came from Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson and it suffered for that. I've seen plenty of movies starring folks like Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler where all the humor comes from the star and those are almost always bad movies. In Baby Mama, however, we get people like Steve Martin's Barry, the pretentious New Agey owner of Kate's company who, instead of explaining himself through a prospectus or Powerpoint presentation, talk about auras, energies and essences and, at one point, rewards Kate's especially good work with five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact. We also get Sigourney Weaver playing Chaffee Bicknell, the owner of the agency that handles surrogate pregnancies. Not only is she as pretentious as her name would suggest but she is also freakishly fertile, still having babies far past where most women would have gone through menopause, a fact that she often throws in Kate's face. There are also Angie's husband and Kate's doorman, played by Dax Shepard and Romany Malco, who both provide many laughs.
Baby Mama is not a great movie that I'll remember fondly as the years go by but it's a good one that gave me some good laughs and didn't once make me think of feces, slime, monsters or hell. I don't feel I can ask for much more than that.
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