Who's Your Mama?

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Tina Fey is sublime.

And oh, how I wanted to enjoy Baby Mama, which I reviewed for the Charleston City Paper. I loved Tina Fey's Mean Girl's script and appreciate her skeptical-lady take on contemporary life (a favorite Fey-ism was her calling Hugh Hefner's gaggle of bimbette girlfriends "tit meat").

There were some laughs in Baby Mama to distract, and take the sting off the world outside the theater doors, as any comedy should. But movies like this remind me of how hard it is to get excited about going to see a movie sometimes, when there is so much half-baked or just plain awful product circulating. Watching Werner Herzog's documentary Land of Silence and Darkness last night, I felt a pang of longing for directors with such a ravenous interest in people and life and with such a quiet, delicate touch. Delicacy and subtlety seem so rare these days. Like so many people I talk to, I want to sandbag the front yard and hole up with Netflix and forget that Speed Racer and Iron Man are knocking at the front door. And though his recent profile was fun to read, unlike David Carr, I don't think Robert Downey, Jr. is the second coming.

After reading the Anthony Lane review of Baby Mama in The New Yorker, I agree, that the gist of the film is class warfare, though I wanted some incisive, snarky girl-take on reproductive issues. But the film could have gone a little deeper in this regard.

I did enjoy the digs at yuppie organic/green obsession in Baby Mama. If I read one more article about $700 "green" hemp purses I am going to lose my mind. Or sustainable body lotion in plastic bottles. Urg.

There's so much to say about that smug, self-satisfaction at shopping at the right places. Eating the right foods. Caring so very deeply. It's as if you're making a political statement by picking up a bag of potato chips these days: something along the lines of, "yes, I am an American glutton who has failed to make the evolutionary leap to a $6 bag of Terra chips. And my Frito-Lay purchase makes it clear that I support the war in Iraq."

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