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Mike Wilmington

By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, May 18th, 2012 - No Comments »

Wilmington on Movies: What to Expect When You’re Expecting

WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING (Two Stars)
U.S.: Kirk Jones, 2012

If you’re pregnant, or if your significant other is pregnant, or if you’re just in the mood for another modern rom-com with an all-star cast, you may get a kick or two (sorry) out of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, a not-very-good movie with a pretty good cast. Based — or rather “inspired by” — a longtime best-selling pregnancy guide book by Heidi Murkoff, this is yet another example of why it seems so hard to make good or funny romantic comedies these days — although here the subject mostly deals with what happens after the heavy breathing has stopped and the consequences of parenthood loom large.

How do you make a movie out of a best-seller self-help guide about pregnancy? How do you make a movie out of a best-seller self-help guide about anything? (The only good example that comes to mind is Woody Allen’s 1972 all-star film of Dr. David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask).

But I doubt that “Hire Woody Allen” is an acceptable answer to those questions. Instead, director Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine and Nanny McPhee) and writers Shauna Cross (Whip It) and Heather Hach (Legally Blonde: The Musical) have decided to craft an ensemble comedy, mostly set in Atlanta, in which four couples go though pregancy problems, one other couple tackles adoption, and three of the twosomes (Cameron Diaz & Matthew Morrison, Elizabeth Banks & Ben Falcone, Brooklyn Decker & Dennis Quaid) amazingly wind up in the obstetrics ward all at the same time. (I refuse to even consider a spoiler alert for this.)

OH WELL, SPOILER ALERT

At the same time, astonishingly, the fourth couple (Jennifer Lopez and Rodrigo Santoro) adopt a baby in Ethiopia, and the fifth couple (Anna Kendrick and Chace Crawford) hold hands, stride through the hospital corridor and face the future (and any possible sequels),

END OF ALERT

The writers’ imaginations are fertile. (Sorry). This is not one of those anemic rom-coms with few characters and lots of clichés. This one has lots of characters and even more clichés. Banks plays pregnant Wendy, the author of a best-selling book on lactation and propreitor of a store called, I believe,  Breast Choice (or possibly The Breast is Yet to Come). Her squeamish hubby Gary (Falcone) is an overweight nebbish whose dad Ramsey (Quaid) is a rich exNASCAR champ with a young, gorgeous (and also pregnant) wife named Skyler (Decker). Diaz’ Jules runs a weight-loss clinic, and was impregnated by her partner on a TV dance contest show, Evan (Morrison, of “Glee“), aftere throwing up on the show. Lopez’ Holly is the prospective adoptive mother with husband Alex (Santoro); both of them play more for seriousness than for laughs. The result is the same.

The most convincing couple in the movie, which tells you how convincing the movie is, is the twosome of duelling food truck owners Rosie (Kendrick) and Marco (Crawford),who move from rivalry to a one night stand to prospective parenthood to…..Well, we’ll leave that to your bestseller-fed imagination.

Stranger than the fact that the stork (so to speak) ends up making so many deliveries to the same ward, and to people who know each other (sometimes), while apparently keeping tabs on events in Ethiopia, and cueing the music for Rosie and Marco, is the fact that some of the quintet, have baby-related occupations (baby photographer, breast-feeding manuals and the like) and can therefore dispnese wisdom from Ms. Murkoff’s book. Or the fact that four seeming househusbands, calling themselves the Dude’s Group –played by Chris Rock (spewing wisecracks like a late-night Vesuvius of wit) , Tom Lennon, Rob Heugel and Amir Talai — keep strolling through the movie, through a sunny park, looking like a mini-Wild Bunch with baby carriages and dispensing more baby wisdom — though they’re seemingly unable to keep one of their clumsier little kids, named Jordan (after Michael Jordan?) from getting continuously bonked on the head.

Nnne of this though is as peculiar or as funny as the episode in Allen‘s Everything…Sex, where Gene Wilder falls in love with a sheep. But maybe that’s one of the reasons why Allen isn’t writing or directing here..

Actually. this is kind of a sweet-tempered picture. You will have noted that it has a very good cast, But it matters little, since the script, following  the usual modern rom-com norm, is a poor one: hectic and preachy and clichéd and not every funny. (Rebel Wilson as Janice, Wendy’s friend, is the only consistent laugh-getter.) Diaz, Banks and Decker have all been given senwhat convincing prosthetitic tummies. And in the end, they all scream convincingly.

But the movie, which tries hard to leaven its sunny comedy and advice with a little darkness and realism, succeeds only in dredging up unwelcome memories (to me) of Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve, and unpleasant thoughts of a possible “What to Expect When You’re Expecting: The Musical.” Is that likely? Is that conceivable? I’m afraid to ask.

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“I don’t really think, Sean, that you need to know about my various sexual liaisons. Or that anyone else needs to. I did write about them. I filled a hundred pages of Moleskine notebooks with my one-night stands, my affairs. But I decided they didn’t belong in a professional memoir. First of all, these are real people we’re talking about. Many of them were enjoyable. Some were abject failures. My wife said to me when she read the pages, ‘Of what purpose is this in a memoir? Of what purpose is this other than to titillate?’ The point is, I never see them. It’s because I have nothing in common with them, frankly. And probably didn’t at the time. I could not provide a sensible reason why I married these women. The thing is, in the case of my marriages, it takes two people to fuck up a marriage. It wasn’t simply the fault of these women that I lost interest in them and realised they were insignificant relationships. Which is how I look at them right now–as being insignificant. I see them as blips.”
~ William Friedkin On Cutting Interviewers Off At The Sass

“I have to imagine from Mr. Spielberg’s point of view, the paradigm shift in the 1970s was just the new “normal,” a “halcyon era” from which we are straying in the 21st century–because theatrical exhibition is tenuous (as it has been since the 1940s), the home video market has dried up and people are watching pirated movies on their phone. Spielberg’s coming-of-age era was for him the halcyon period that the 21st century “implosion” will cause to go “crashing into the ground.” But he is wrong. The market for movies is actually diverse and highly segmented–although from the top-down movie industry vantage point and media punditry you would not think this to be true.  Would we really mourn for Mr. Spielberg or ourselves if Lincoln would have been made for cable or had played on public television?  Is it bad for humanity that cable television is creating wonderful, resonant stories in long-form series that people want to watch at home on TV (or streamed onto their computer)? I don’t think so, but it is a paradigm shift and it might affect people’s theatrical moviegoing habits. Televisions in people’s homes have had that effect for seven decades–it is not a new phenomenon. As Art House cinema impresarios we need to focus on what WE can do at our theaters and in our communities. It is not productive for us to fret over what pundits say or about what well-meaning filmmakers like the Stevens–Spielberg and Soderbergh–say. We should fret about what we can do in our communities. What we can do to support filmmakers.”
~ From A Response By Russ Collins, CEO, Michigan Theater – Ann Arbor And Director, Art House Convergence, To Mr. Spielberg