The Screengrab : baby mama

Why Must Steve Martin Suck?

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

I understand why Robin Williams movies suck. Sure, he’s done good (or at least interesting) work in everything from Moscow On The Hudson and The Best of Times to The Fisher King and even creepy, icky One Hour Photo (part of the “dark Robin” trilogy along with Insomnia and Death To Smoochy). For the most part, though, Williams is primarily known for some combination of annoying, "look at me! look at me!" over-the-top wacky (Mrs. Doubtfire, Toys, every single talk show appearance ever) and/or shameless, cloying, dewy-eyed schmaltz (Jack, Patch Adams, Fathers' Day...oh God, I’m choking on my own vomit)...

But I get that. Williams is a needy, hyperactive mental case. Sure, he’s talented and seems like a sweet, well-meaning guy, too...but I’m also guessing he’s been to a LOT of Narcotics Anonymous meetings full of weepy, life-affirming speeches and “I love you, man” hugs. On some level, I’m willing to believe Williams actually enjoyed his own performance in License To Wed.

But Steve Martin knows better...doesn’t he? I mean, in real life, the man is an icy-cool art-collecting intellectual. He’s written witty pieces for The New Yorker and well-received plays and books like Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Shopgirl and The Underpants. He studied English poetry in college and majored in philosophy. He was the classiest Oscar host since Carson. He’s a zillionaire, fer chrissakes. SO WHY IS THIS MAN STARRING IN THE PINK PANTHER 2?

Sure, okay, yes, he started his career as the “wild-and-crazy guy” of The Jerk and "King Tut" fame...but whereas a comedian like Williams is willing to do just about anything for a laugh, Martin, even at his goofiest, always seemed to be in on the joke: the Jerk was actually, in fact, the smartest guy in the room.

And right from the jump he wasn’t afraid to go dark and edgy, as evidenced by his underrated turn as the doomed feckless dreamer in Pennies From Heaven. But with the exception of roles in a handful of projects like The Spanish Prisoner and his own Shopgirl (where he played, respectively, a villainous con man and a rich man incapable of love), Martin has left the tantalizing possibilities of his dramatic range woefully unexplored. He could easily be having Bill Murray’s film career now...

...but, fine, let’s say he’s just not that into drama. He is, after all, a comedian. So then the question becomes: why so many shitty comedies, Steve? Sure, Bill Murray will phone in the occasional Garfield to help finance his alimony payments, but overall the man has very little to apologize for in a thirty-year career: Where The Buffalo Roam was terrible (but at least he was genuinely interested in the subject matter), Kingpin was stupid (but funny), Wild Things was trashy (but at least it was good trash), etc.

Conversely, I challenge Steve Martin to point to a single redeeming quality in The Pink Panther (x2), Cheaper By The Dozen (x2) or the deeply unfunny and, frankly, morally reprehensible Father of the Bride (which, like his other terrible, terrible movies, he felt compelled to make twice). Martin isn’t just a Hall Of Fame stand-up comedian, he’s also written and/or appeared in some really good (or at least pretty good) comedies like All of Me, Roxanne, Planes/Trains/etc., L.A. Story, Baby Mama and even Parenthood, so it’s not like he doesn’t know better. And it’s not like he needs the money. And he doesn’t even have any kids (the usual excuse for smart actors who appear in dumb-ass “family” entertainments).

So why, Steve?

Why?

Related Stories:
Trailer Review: The Pink Panther 2
Allen and Martin In Print

Heterosexual Males Survive “Sex and the City”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

I’m going to go out on a limb and gently suggest that there may be something vaguely condescending about this AP story by Jake Coyle, beginning with its dateline: ESTROGEN CENTRAL. “This reporter was (forcibly) dispatched to a Manhattan theater to determine whether the ultimate ‘chick flick’ could be a welcoming experience for a guy,” the brave Coyle writes. “And with look of determination that said, yes, he was confident enough about himself to make such a trip, this reporter went. Talk about embedded journalism.”

But surprise! “Interviews with three couples suggested that Sex and the City has plenty to offer men — or at least isn't worth avoiding like a well-dressed plague.” One man who at first claims he was dragged to the movie by his date breaks down under Coyle’s relentless interrogation to confess: “I'm totally into it and I'm straight,” says Anthony Smith, who goes on to report, “You understand women better watching Sex and the City.” Well, let’s hope that’s not entirely true. I for one am eagerly awaiting the reports from women who claim to understand men better after viewing The Incredible Hulk. But then, you never see those sorts of reports, do you? Somehow it’s deemed worthy of comment that some men have actually relented and deigned to attend Sex and the City with their significant others, but where are the interviews with women who are deeply embarrassed to be attending Iron Man? Besides, a quick scan of the box office top 10 reveals at least three other certified chick flicks doing well in theaters: What Happens in Vegas, Made of Honor and Baby Mama. Why, it’s almost as if Sex and the City isn’t the first movie ever targeted to a female demographic!

As it happens, Coyle found at least one couple with whom the idea of attending the movie originated with the male. The “facilitator” declined to be identified in the story, however. I guess America isn’t quite ready for that.

Tribeca 2008 Wraps Up

Phil Nugent — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:00:00 GMT

The sixth annual Tribeca Film Festival wraps up tonight with the premiere of the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer, which will soon be joining the festival's earlier glossy Hollywood premieres, Baby Mama with Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler and David Mamet's Redbelt, in general theatrical release. Most of the major festivals awards were handed out last Thursday. These included Tomas Alfredson's young-vampire story Let the Right One In, winner of the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature; Hüseyin Karabey, winner of the Best New Narrative Filmmaker prize for his acted-documentary love story My Marlon and Brando; young Thomas Turgoose and Piotr Jagiello, who share the Best Actor honors for their teamwork in Shane Meadows's Somers Town; Eileen Walsh, winner of the Best Actress award for her work in Declan Recks's Eden; Gini Reticker's Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which won as the Best Documentary Feature; and Old Man Bebo, which earned its director, Carlos Carcas, a citation as Best New Documentary Filmmaker. The final prize, the Cadillac Award given to the "audience favorite" film based on ballots filled in by festivalgoers, was announced last night on the TV show Tribeca Presents: Best of the Festival. It went to C. Kareim Chrobog's documentary War Child, about the Sudanese heip-hop performer Emmanuel Jal, who fled civil war in his homeland and who, in the course of the filming, returned to Susan and was reunited with his family for the first time in eighteen years. (The effects of the African civil wars on the children of that region was something of an unplanned subtheme running through many of the best documentaries at Tribeca this year, from Pray the Devil Back to Hell to the ESPN film Kassim the Dream.) "Our audiences fell in love with Emmanuel Jal through Karim's film," said festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal. "I hope this movie not only serves to entertain people but is a call to action to help the millions of children in Africa in need of food, education, and love."

Tribeca is still a very young festival, one that has been both blessed and cursed by being bathed in a much denser concentration of publicity and critical scrutiny than, say, the Sundance or Toronto Film Festivals had to deal with at a comparable point in their development. Mention of last year's sprawling event, which was accused of overreaching, confusion, and inflated ticket prices, still inspires shudders in some of the people who worked on it and have the streak of white in their hair to prove it. This year things seemed to go much smoother, and in general the 2008 festival did pretty well by its self-made mandate to provide a forum for the art of film without giving a cold shoulder to the virtues of quality mass entertainment. Now that it's over, everyone who's spent the past dozen days in Tribeca can carry that mission forward by finally going to see Iron Man.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Trucker"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

James Mottern's Trucker is a throwback, the kind of low-budget, low-impact drama about grubby, ordinary people that used to be as plentiful at film festivals as fleas on a sheepdog in summertime. They still make these kinds of movies, of course, and one way to get one not just made but shown in a few places is to cast an attractive, up-and-coming actor or actress who's tired of being used as set direction and wants to show that he or she can act, or at least pass for ordinary. The title character in Trucker stars Michelle Monaghan, who looked a little too dewy fresh to be spending her afternoons interrogating neighborhood barroom toughs in Gone Baby Gone. She looks much looser and happier in her first scenes here, playing Diane, a long-haul trucker who owns her own rig and lives by herself in her little San Diego crash pad. You can see what attracted Monaghan to this role. She's terrific in her opening scene, preparing to leave a motel and get back on the room but first impatiently trying to keep a straight while listening to the naked, nameless stud in the bed sheepishly assure her that he wasn't just "using" her. She also does fine teamwork with Nathan Fillion, who plays the less macho half of their relationship; he's the married "best friend" who's been pining for her for four years while serving as her steady platonic date between one-night stands. When she joins him at a kids' softball game and stares at him in dismay when she sees what's in his go-cup, Fillion drawls, "I'm not drinkin', per se, I'm celebratin' life."

Trucker might have sustained itself better if it hadn't had any plot at all, but probably Mottern didn't feel that he was ready to try anything too avant-garde. So Diane, like half the women in movies these days, acquires a kid. Unlike Tina Fey in Baba Mama, she got hers the old-fashioned way, by getting pregnant by Benjamin Bratt and then leaving him a dozen years before the movie starts. The little life changer lands on her doorstep when Bratt succombs to colon cancer and is too busy dying to stay on top of the play date schedule. (Bratt, who could use a career jump=start of his own--didn't his character leave Law & Order because his wife was sick? has he considered offering to come back to the show, given that she must have died by now?-- has a big tearjerker death bed scene with the kid. "I guess you can tell by looking at me that I'm not in the best shape of my life," he says, but in fact he looks pretty and well-fed and hale enough to bench-press a horse. Maybe the film crew couldn't afford to rent some footage of sick people for him to look at, though the makeup department did do its best to help out by apparently painting his head light gray, perhaps to see what he'd look like playing the early version of the Incredible Hulk.)

Monaghan and the kid have a decent exchange early on; she asks him why he doesn't want to talk to her, he replies, "I don't talk to bitches," and she says, "Fair enough." But soon she's turning all motherly and repentant in the face of all the contrivance, with the little bastard functioning as a living, breathing "J'accuse!" Trying to push him away for his own good, she bawls, "I am who I am! I'm always gonna be like this," and from her tone you may end up wondering if you missed a couple of reels where she was robbing banks and sending the money to Bin Laden or sacrificing puppies to Satan, her dark lord. To fully appreciate Trucker on its own terms, you have to be prepared to react with horror to the idea that a woman who works hard at her job and who even turns out to be a pretty good mother when she has to be might sometimes want to arrange her own play date to sneak off to a Motel 6 with a handsome stranger and fuck each other's brains out.

In Other Blogs: The Armond White Vendetta

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:45:00 GMT

This week finds the movie blogosphere all hot and bothered over New York Press critic Armond White’s latest jeremiad, “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies.” (If you’re not familiar with Mr. White’s bomb-throwing rhetorical strategies and absurdly contrarian taste in movies, please don your flame-retardant suit before reading.) Among other things, White is concerned that the internet is overrun with know-nothing idiots blathering about film, and of course, we resemble that remark. Glenn Kenny, for one, has had enough. "My friend (well, he was my friend, and then he does this) Aaron Aradillas points me to New York Press critic Armond White's latest 'everybody in the world sucks but me' screed, ‘What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Movies,’ which he kicks off by flexing his disdain for the ‘opinionated throng’ of internet critics who emulate the ‘Vachel Lindsay-Manny Farber tradition.’ That's a great start, given that only a person who has read either Farber, or Lindsay, but by no means both, could possibly conceive of yoking the two together in this way. White then goes on to piss all over the recently-grievously-ailing Roger Ebert...after which he wishes him ‘nothing but health.’ That's awfully sweet of him…Now, White's known for spewing bile at his peers in print, and then turning around and being quite affable to said peers in person—I've experienced it. And I've had it. So: screw you, Armond. Don't say ‘hi’ next time you see me at a screening because you won't get a 'hi' back. You think you're applying some form of moral rigor to your work, but the fact is that you're a bully and a hypocrite, and I don't want to know you.”

At Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells doesn’t take it so personally. In fact, he’s quite the White fan. “Nobody in the world -- nobody -- throws brilliant, super-analytical lightning bolts from his own incredibly fickle and ferocious orbit like New York Press critic Armond White. Judgment! Judgment! He's immensely readable, fearless, provocative. Film criticism today would be in a much poorer and less observant state without him. But he's so alone now. He's so up there and out there that he's barely seems to be breathing the same common air or standing on any kind of recognizable terra firma….Only White can say stuff that I find almost appalling (but always amusing) in its hermetic and secluded considerations, but at the same make points that I know deep down to be true, or at least worthy of serious consideration.”

Living in Cinema has a more or less even-handed take on the whole situation. “I don’t much care for Armond White and I know he wouldn’t much care for me if he knew I existed, but sometimes the man has a point….Print criticism, in part because of its for-profit nature and in part because of its cozy relationship with the very thing it would criticize, is largely a failure. It’s a monolithic dinosaur that is on the verge of extinction and I say ‘good riddance.’ I also agree that much of what has rushed to fill the void via the Internet is garbage. For starters, there is too much emphasis on box office figures….There is also, I suppose, a necessarily watered down quality to the overwhelming mass of Internet movie reporting. There are too many of us doing this and many of us kind of suck.”

Elsewhere in the worldwide web of suck, Beyond the Multiplex takes a look at the Tribeca Film Festival and wonders exactly what it’s supposed to be. “I never know quite what to say about the Tribeca Film Festival, which launched its 2008 edition on Wednesday night with the premiere of the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler comedy Baby Mama. Maybe that's because the festival's reason for existing has never seemed entirely clear. How do Baby Mama and the Wachowski siblings' Speed Racer, this year's Hollywoodized red-carpet premieres, fit into a festival that encompasses sports movies, experimental New York documentaries, unknown art films from Eastern Europe and the Arab world, and a collection of would-be art-house hits vacuumed up from other festivals? Maybe it's a dumb question. Those things stick together because they're all part of a large, diverse and incoherent film festival that clogs up Manhattan during the very nicest spring weather and fleetingly captures the industry's attention before all the film-biz bigwigs jet off to Cannes.”

And finally, from the “wish we could be there” department, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has the scoop on the Southern California Drive-In Movie Society’s celebration of the 75th anniversary of the drive-in theater. “The Mission Tiki Drive-in has the Punk Rock Drive-in outdoor festival scheduled monthly through September, as well as its second all-day-and- into-the-night Tiki Invasion II, featuring 10 different bands, a burlesque revue, a hot rod car show and a great opportunity to see genuine drive-in movie classics like Death Race 2000, Zombie and Invasion of the Bee Girls on the giant outdoor screen, just like God intended. The Mission Tiki also has what promises to be a great all-night Monsterama Halloween horror movie festival scheduled for October…But this weekend it's all happening at the Vineland Drive-in in City of Industry, where the Southern California Drive-in Movie Society will kick off its fourth season in celebration of the 75th anniversary of drive-in history with this summer’s first Drive-in Tailgate Party.”

Hot Mama

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Over in the Village Voice, Julia Wallace pens the first of what's likely to be many, many profiles of suddenly ubiquitous comic actress Amy Poehler. Poehler, who went from being featured in almost any comedy show worth watching in the early 2000s to everyone's favorite pal-around comedienne in recent years, is co-starring with Saturday Night Live co-star and inexplicable It Girl Tina Fey in the embarrassingly titled but promising Baby Mama, debuting this week at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her career has taken an odd turn, to say the least, and Wallace thinks she stands poised to make the transition from well-liked 'alternative comedian' to the most famous Hollywood Amy not named Ryan, Archer or Adams.

It's a pretty funny interview on its own merits -- with her improv background and a decade of experience, Poehler's always been one of the more able interviews in terms of coming up with spur-of-the-moment laughs -- but it gets especially enlightening when she decides to let a few glimpses of seriousness sneak into her jokey answers. Baby Mama has gotten a decent amount of attention for its focus on class issues and the difficulty of raising children from a financial standpoint; Poehler describes the film as a comedy version of Reds. Likewise, when Wallace tries to draw her out on the issue of making a career as a leading lady who specialized in comedy, using Christopher Hitchens' now-ancient "women aren't funny" essay as bait, Poehler won't bite: "I think that story's an old story. Same thing with 'SNL is a boy's club...they're all just kind of lazy headlines to me." But she does wax effusive about Baby Mama's status as that rarest of beasts, a female buddy comedy. "It's exactly what we were going for. We wanted it to be as much Wedding Crashers as it was Working Girl -- something that felt just like two buddies having a fun time. It was us getting to do comedy in a way that didn't necessarily have to be specific to 'lady comedy'. Not that I even know what that is, since I am a lady."

Tina Fey is My Baby Mama

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Your Entertainment Weekly cover gal is Tina Fey, and why not? Not only is she riding high on television with 30 Rock, for which she won a Golden Globe, but she has some new movie product to promote. It’s Baby Mama, of course, and it’s about as high concept as it gets: upscale but infertile Fey hires white trash Amy Poehler to have her baby for her. ''I liked the topicality of the fertility issues that affect so many people,'' says Fey. ''There's so much weirdness and emotion about it. If you start with something juicy, you end up with a better [movie] than if you just start with some jokes. And Amy liked that it did not have anything to do with a goddamn wedding.'' Well, there is that to be thankful for.

Not that Fey is entirely comfortable on the A-list yet, as we learn when “she recounts her near run-in with director M. Night Shyamalan at the studio; Fey chose not to introduce herself, because she wasn't sure it was him until after he left (‘I thought it'd be racist to go up to the wrong Indian guy and ask if he was M. Night Shyamalan'’).”

There’s a lot of talk in the EW piece about how much heart the movie has and how that might translate to box office success, but we don’t care about any of that. We’re more interested in the time she called one-time SNL host Paris Hilton a “piece of shit” on The Howard Stern Show. ''I should really strive to have better manners about those things,'' says Fey. ''Pretty soon my kid's going to understand what I'm saying and be able to access it on the computer. I screwed up something a few months ago and I was like, 'You know who wouldn't do that? Tom Hanks. You know who would keep his mouth shut? Tom Hanks. I should try to be like Tom Hanks.'''

The Baby Mama website offers a clever little gimmick, if little else: it’s the Baby Mama Maker! Upload photos of any two faces and the software will reveal what your offspring will look like. I tried it using photos of myself and Tina Fey, and here, as a Screengrab exclusive, is our baby, Apple! Isn’t she adorable?

Hulu: Destroying Worker Productivity One Movie at a Time

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Are you down with Hulu yet? The latest online on-demand viewing site launched two weeks ago, and is drawing rave reviews for its library of free TV shows and movies. The former is none of our business here at the Screengrab (although just look at all those episodes of Archie Bunker’s Place!), but the latter is…well, let’s just call it a work in progress.

Not that we’re complaining; Hulu is just getting started, after all. You can watch a movie for free as long as you’re willing to sit through a trailer of Baby Mama, and the video and sound quality is certainly leaps and bounds beyond your YouTubes. But for the moment at least, the selection is a bit sparse and, how shall we say…random. The most popular items are of relatively recent vintage: Ice Age, Fever Pitch, 28 Days Later and The Big Lebowski are all available if you’re looking to burn off the rest of your work day. But there are also some more obscure offerings, like 1958’s Attack of the Puppet People, John Huston’s The Barbarian and the Geisha, and both Dr. Goldfoot movies starring Vincent Price.

It’s hard to know where to start. Arnold Schwarzenegger (or “Arnold Strong” as he was billed) in Hercules in New York? Cheech & Chong in The Corsican Brothers? How about the 1977 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau? You can browse the full list here, but if you end up getting fired, don’t blame us.

Trailer Review: Baby Mama

John Constantine — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:52:00 GMT

I realize that it’s been asked many times before in recent days but, seriously, what is going on with baby movies? It’s been a more obvious trend in the past twelve months with successes like Knocked Up and Juno, but this has been brewing for a few years now. I’m convinced it all started with Idiocracy in 2006. Yeah, it’s a broad satire but the movie’s base premise is that smart people aren’t breeding. Fill us in with your theories in the comments section, we’re all ears.

As for Baby Mama, it’s looking pretty funny. Fey’s playing her forlorn-lonely-aging-fastidious thing to perfection and Poehler’s as delightfully zany as ever. They are truly the Wayne and Garth of this decade and it’s nice to see them continue collaborating. It’s also nice to see two female leads in the male-dominated screwball comedy genre. Make Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow’s respective crews look like chumps, Tina. The Grab’s got your back.