Baby Mama

Baby fever is ever-so-gently but slyly lampooned in Michael McCuller's "Baby Mama," starring Tina Fey as a single, successful businesswoman who wants a baby and the white-trash surrogate (Amy Poehler) she hires to have it for her. Had Fey written the movie, you get the feeling, the skewering would have rendered it a delicious shish kebab of social satire. Instead, it aims to please, which isn't bad either.

I'm not sure exactly when Tina Fey became a certifiable star, but I do know why. It all begins with the face. Not the one that is glammed up, airbrushed and lighted to within an inch of its life that graces magazine covers these days. It's the other one that carries exhaustion around like a cranky toddler in the current box-office hit "Date Night"; the one that wakes up in Liz Lemon's apartment with drool on one cheek in NBC's " 30 Rock." It's a face that goes slack and open-mouthed in surprise at so much of life, more comfortable with no makeup, stacking up laugh lines like folding chairs after a Little League banquet.

The folks behind Universal Pictures' new comedy "Baby Mama" must feel a bit like the guy in that old pop song: "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right." The female buddy movie starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, opening today on the final weekend before the summer movie season, had been scheduled to come out a week ago.

Rielle Hunter's nearly 10,000-word GQ interview plus cringe- inducing photo spread (think bare legs, surrounded by stuffed animals) hit the media fan this week, but as far as I'm concerned, the definitive work on John Edwards' mistress-turned-baby-mama appeared on this page nearly two years ago. In an August 2008, Op-Ed writer Sarah Miller explained how she made Hunter's acquaintance when Hunter moved into a rented room in Benedict Canyon that...

The Tina Fey-Amy Poehler comedy "Baby Mama" delivered for Universal Pictures, topping the weekend box office with estimated ticket sales of $18.3 million despite competition from two other high-profile comedies. Some analysts and executives at rival studios had expressed doubts about Universal's strategy of releasing its odd couple story a week after opening another female-skewing comedy, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," and on the same weekend as the Warner Bros.

Is TINA FEY, former head writer for "Saturday Night Live" and creator and star of one of the best shows on television, "30 Rock," going to get hit with a knee-jerk media backlash now? It could happen, given the blood-thirst that motivates so much cultural writing these days and, of course, her "convention-defying" success.

The unwritten rule of Hollywood comedies is like that classic admonition given boxers the night before a fight: Women weaken legs. Here the legs are a movie's potential at the box office. Which is why it seems unusual -- if not illegal -- for two females, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, to have the leads in a buddy comedy, "Baby Mama," opening Friday.

You could talk about: Ashlee Simpson. It feels awfully cynical to wonder if her recent engagement to Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz and the subsequent pregnancy rumors were timed to help promote her new album, "Bittersweet World," just like it feels awfully cynical to think this girl would have no career if it weren't for her older sister, the nose job and the reality show on MTV. Or to think the only reason this album might be listenable is because Timbaland worked on it.

I READ with dismay your breezy review of "Baby Mama," a new film about surrogate "motherhood" ["It's Fertile Territory," by Carina Chocano, April 25]. I don't see how a movie about womb rental or related reprotech practices, such as IVF, sperm or egg selling, could possibly be funny. Twenty years ago, in the Baby M decision, which invalidated surrogacy contracts in New Jersey, Chief Justice Robert Wilentz declared that, "In a civilized society, some things are not for sale." Similarly, in a decent society, some things are not funny.

To old-school Hollywood press agents, there was no such thing as bad publicity. The folks at Jamba Juice apparently subscribe to the same philosophy. In the new movie comedy "Baby Mama," Greg Kinnear plays the owner of a small juice bar who recoils at repeated suggestions that his shop is like Jamba Juice, the Emeryville, Calif.-based chain with 728 stores across the country. Kinnear's character calls Jamba Juice the Wal-Mart of the smoothie world, deriding its proprietors as "corporate juice pimps."

"The Office" and "30 Rock" are tying the knot. Again. Steve Carell and Tina Fey, the stars of the two NBC shows who also play an on-screen pair in the upcoming movie "Date Night," may be planning yet another cinematic hook-up. They're attached to play an unlikely couple in a new romantic comedy called "Mail-Order Groom." The film is written by Robert Carlock and Scott Silveri based on an idea that they created with Jeff Richmond, a co-executive producer on "30 Rock" with Carlock.

It seemed somehow inevitable that 2009 would be an Amy Poehler year, that the actress would be lifted by the rising water that is Tina Fey -- her former "Saturday Night Live Weekend Update" co-anchor and her costar in last year's "Baby Mama" -- and by her part in the pop-cultural wing of the 2008 election, in which she imitated Hillary Rodham Clinton and rapped like (but not as) Sarah Palin.

Compiling my year-end lists always makes me realize how many areas there are in which I'm not an expert. Jazz, Latin music, down-tempo electronica, Finnish Christian mystical jams . . . there are so many icebergs out there, and I've hardly touched their tips. I do often wander into some specialized areas, however. One is kids' music. Since I am a mama, that stuff gets into my house and onto the stereo. My 5-year-old (happy birthday, Bebe!) is the kind of obsessive listener most kids become when they turn into tweens.

House Wilson: It was an accident! It wasn't House's fault that you weren't home and your girlfriend, Amber, had a soft side and wanted to rescue the drunken doc. It wasn't House's fault that she insisted on getting on the bus with him and it wasn't House's fault that she was taking some weird prescription drug that apparently you shouldn't be taking when you're about to be in a bus accident. Now, make up and be best friends again or they're going to make Kutner and Taub the show's new BFFs!

The deal Universal Pictures options Mickey Rapkin's "Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory," which chronicles the cutthroat -- but deeply human -- world of a cappella singing groups, and their fierce battles for supremacy. The players Actress Elizabeth Banks ("The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Spider-Man 3") and Max Handelman producing. Kay Cannon ("30 Rock" and "Baby Mama") writing the screenplay. Rapkin is repped by Farley Chase at the Waxman Literary Agency and on film rights by Howard Sanders at United Talent Agency.

The fourth Indiana Jones film, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," got off to a strong start over the Memorial Day weekend, although overall movie ticket sales remained down from last year's pace. Sales in the U.S. and Canada, May 23-26: Movie (studio): 1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount) 4-day gross (millions): $126.9 Total (millions): $152.0 Venues: 4,260 Average per venue: $29,793 Weeks: 1 -- Movie (studio): 2.

House Wilson: It was an accident! It wasn't House's fault that you weren't home and your girlfriend, Amber, had a soft side and wanted to rescue the drunken doc. It wasn't House's fault that she insisted on getting on the bus with him and it wasn't House's fault that she was taking some weird prescription drug that apparently you shouldn't be taking when you're about to be in a bus accident. Now, make up and be best friends again or they're going to make Kutner and Taub the show's new BFFs!

The fourth Indiana Jones film, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," got off to a strong start over the Memorial Day weekend, although overall movie ticket sales remained down from last year's pace. Sales in the U.S. and Canada, May 23-26: Movie (studio): 1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount) 4-day gross (millions): $126.9 Total (millions): $152.0 Venues: 4,260 Average per venue: $29,793 Weeks: 1 -- Movie (studio): 2.

"PULLING Back the Drapes," a new exhibition at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Fourth Floor Gallery, looks to shed some light on an individual who is instrumental in breathing three-dimensional life into the two-dimensional realm of the movies: the set decorator. "The production designers create the world and the architecture in collaboration with the directors and their vision," explains academy programmer Ellen Harrington.

To old-school Hollywood press agents, there was no such thing as bad publicity. The folks at Jamba Juice apparently subscribe to the same philosophy. In the new movie comedy "Baby Mama," Greg Kinnear plays the owner of a small juice bar who recoils at repeated suggestions that his shop is like Jamba Juice, the Emeryville, Calif.-based chain with 728 stores across the country. Kinnear's character calls Jamba Juice the Wal-Mart of the smoothie world, deriding its proprietors as "corporate juice pimps."