Baby Mama

All right, here it is: BABY MAMA is laugh-out-loud funny.

Here's the setup: ridiculously hot Tina Fey is a career woman whose biological clock is ticking ... like ... this. Problem is, her doctor "doesn't like her uterus," and it looks like she'll never be able to carry a baby. Enter ridiculously hot (and surprisingly funny) Sigourney Weaver as Chafee Bicknell, proprietress of a first class surrogacy service. She matches rhTF with consistently funny Amy Poehler, whose white trash bonafides are cemented by her common-law marriage to ever entertaining Dax Shepard.

And away we go, in a class and culture and gender comedy that's consistently funny and perceptive. rhTF proves that not only can she sway an election, she can carry a movie. How much so? BABY MAMA features Steve Martin's best comedy work in years, and rhTF measures up to him in every frame. cfAP does great work with what could have been an elementary role, and eeDS and the rest of the supporting cast (including Maura Tierney, Romany Malco, Will Forte, Fred Armison, John Hodgeman, and the always likable Greg Kinnear as the love interest) are just plain first rate. The script casts a knowing comedic eye on pregnancy and love, and it manages to be simultaneously sharp, biting, and hilarious.

BABY MAMA is way funnier than I'd expected. It made me lose track of time and kept me chuckling right through the end credits. To those who were put off by the crass and dull trailer, be not deceived by the poor decisions of the marketing department. This picture is a winner.

Idiocracy

IDIOCRACY is a one-joke movie. It's a pretty good joke, and I know this because watched IDIOCRACY in three parts, as dictated by the events of my day. Each time I started (or returned to) the movie, I laughed out loud the first two or three times I got the joke. Then, however, I settled in and hummed along, reasonably amused and a little uncomfortable, until the next interruption (or the end of the film). When you tell the same joke over and over, that's about the most you can hope for.

Here's the joke: the main characters are surrounded by stupefyingly idiotic people. That makes for funny situations at first, but eventually we viewers come to accept the stupidity and move on. If humor lies in the gap between observation and apprehension, IDIOCRACY makes the gap so small that there's no room for a belly laugh.

Here's the setup: Owen Wilson and Maya Rudolph, two extraordinarily average people, are sent into the far future. Once there, they discover that Will Durant was right - the future does belong to the fertile. America's smartest people have underreproduced, while the dullards have multiplied like - well, in creator Mike Judge's estimate - dullards. People of the future are so dumb, so boorish, so easily led, that they dismiss as "faggy" any speech that makes even the most remote sense. They water their crops with sports drinks because they've been told that plants need electrolytes, then wonder why nothing will grow when it's routinely doused with sugar and salted water. They're so dumb that IDIOCRACY has no internal logic because the systems needed to keep this civilization limping along could not have been designed or maintained by this civilization's own members, nor could this civilization have protected itself from smarter, hungrier, more aggressive civilizations. But we're not supposed to pay attention to any of that. We're supposed to laugh down our noses at the inflated stereotypes that Judge trots out before us, even as we meditate on the decline of our own civilization. And we do laugh, at least at first, but then the joke gets old.

While viewing IDIOCRACY, I felt a growing unease. I'm wrapped pretty tightly in the cocoon of my particular class - so much so that I have very little contact with the class that Judge sees taking over world. Is it possible that people who could be the seeds of IDIOCRACY's comic exaggerations actually exist in any significant numbers? Is America really a "Divorce Court" and "Jerry Springer" kind of place? While watching the film, I couldn't decide whether Judge cruelly misrepresents lower-middle America or I am out of touch.

Regardless, I could decide this: IDIOCRACY can be a pretty funny movie, depending on how you watch it. I recommend short, controlled bursts.

Zathura: A Space Adventure

I flat-out loved ZATHURA.

ZATHURA is basically a remake of JUMANJI, this time with a Space Mountain (as opposed to Jungle Cruise) flavor. I didn't much care for JUMANJI, feeling that the earlier film's sense of danger outweighed its sense of fun. ZATHURA, on the other hand, gets the mix just right, putting its characters in real danger while flipping the audience a wink and letting us know everything's going to be ok.

Jon Favreau, the movie's director, made a wise choice in minimizing his use of CGI in favor of practical effects. When the house in which the film takes place rocks, rolls, get harpooned, and generally suffers, it's a genuine house up on a gimbal that takes all that punishment. The use of practical effects gives them film a solidity and reality that all the "touchdown" shots in the world can't match. Additionally, that reliance on practical magic makes the computer magic all the more breathtaking when Favreau does pull out all the stops.

Part coming of age story, part Boys' Own Adventure, ZATHURA kept three generations of my family spellbound for a good hour and a half. What more could you ask for?