It's the baby boomerang. You want a child, but can't conceive. Or you don't
want one, and unintentionally get pregnant.
Or, as in Baby Mama - like Juno, Knocked Up and Waitress, a droll comedy
where pregnancy is the situation - you can't carry to term, so you hire a
surrogate mother who can.
These days, everyone outsources.
The farce stars Tina Fey as Kate, a buttoned-up Philadelphia business exec
with baby fever, and her erstwhile Saturday Night Live partner Amy Poehler
as Angie, an unzipped Joisey girl. (Except for a few exterior shots,
Brooklyn doubles for Philadelphia.)
The Einstein Sisters of comedy physics, Fey and Poehler know that there is
no absolute state of rest. The comic energy is all in motion, Fey's tension
is released in Poehler's loose-limbed loopiness; Poehler's trespass of
boundaries is kept in check by Fey's border-patrol persona.
On the evidence of their performances, Fey and Poehler are positioning
themselves to become the next Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy of movie comedy.
HAROLD AND KUMAR
ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO
The war on terror goes to pot in this film. Maybe it¹s just as well.
The "Harold and Kumar" strategy is to approach the subject of Patriot Act
excesses with jokes about poop, pee, hookers, drugs, and Neil Patrick
Harris.
In this sequel, the title tokers are headed to Amsterdam for legal dope and
Harold's girlfriend when Kumar's bong is mistaken for a bomb and the pair
(John Cho, Kal Penn) are sent by racist Homeland Security officials to Gitmo
to be detained and humiliated.
As opposed to conventionally tortured. The movie posits there are worse
things than waterboarding, and one of them is to be guarded by guys who look
and act like something out of "Deliverance."
Harold and Kumar break out, and so does a road movie: They escape to Florida
and drive to Texas, where they hope the politically connected fiance of
Kumar's ex-girlfriend may help them out of their jam.
The running joke in "Guantanamo" is that Asian-American Harold and Kumar are
mistaken by a racist/idiot Homeland Security goon (Rob Corddry) for a North
Korean and an Arab terrorist, respectively.
ony Stark, a most dissolute and disarming arms manufacturer, builds
flamethrowers in the basement. For kicks. The bucks aren't bad, either.
IRON MAN
Sporting wit (and goatee) sharp as a survival knife, Robert Downey Jr. is
the billionaire bon vivant in Iron Man, the fast, funny and deliriously
entertaining flick based on Marvel Comics' self-made superhero. Unlike
genetic and environmental supers, this weapons whiz gives himself
superpowers.
A hard-drinking inventor/playboy/businessman, Tony is a hybrid of Howard
Hughes and Hugh Hefner, 1950s fantasy figures gene-spliced for 2008.
Tony sells bombshells to the Pentagon and procures them from the pages of
Maxim. He lives in a Malibu villa with a panoramic view of the Pacific. His
garage is stocked with hot cars, his bed with hotter women. On his private
jet are flight attendants who do double duty as mile-high pole-dancers.
It would appear that there are no limits to the lifestyle of this
smart-aleck designer of smart weapons. Yet, while demonstrating his
company's newest missile, the Jericho, to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Tony
is ambushed by insurgents. To his horror, they hoard Stark Industries
products and want him to build a Jericho to deploy against U.S. forces.
When Tony sees American soldiers killed by the weapons he designed to defend
them, weapons that have left him with a heart full of shrapnel, he has a
crisis of conscience.
With little more than a pile of scrap metal and a welding torch, Tony
hammers out a masterwork of precision weaponry: an armored suit that enables
him to elude captors and reinvent himself as a person concerned about the
consequences of his weapons.
The sardonic Downey as Tony Stark is a risk that pays off. Downey is a
gifted actor who suggests two moods at once, flippantly tossing off serious
commentary, embedding the debate about war into his character. Though
neutral about current events in Afghanistan and Iraq, the film is militantly
anti-war profiteer.
