EVENT DETAILS

Free Summer Film Series: Baby Mama

Baby Mama
Directed by Michael McCullers
(2008, USA, 99 minutes, Rated PG-13)

This female-centered comedy starring former Saturday Night Live cast members Tina Fey and Amy Poehler marks an important, early response to the male-centered, raunchy romantic comedy craze popularized by hits like Wedding Crashers (2005) and Knocked Up (2007). Fey plays a single, successful woman whose infertility and menacingly ticking clock prompt her to hire a quirky, immature surrogate mother played by Poehler. The two form an unexpectedly close friendship that soon becomes threatened by extraordinary circumstances and misunderstandings. This smart comedy also features Steve Martin as Fey’s kooky hippie boss, Greg Kinnear as her sensitive love interest, and Sigourney Weaver as the bizarrely fertile head of a surrogacy firm.

http://www.summer.uci.edu/calendar/filmseries_july.aspx

Free to UCI students, faculty, staff and visitors - No need to RSVP! Free snacks provided to enjoy during the film. Participate in a post-film group discussion with curator Jenna Weinman, a graduate student in Visual Studies.

Although romantic comedies are beloved, or at least well-known, for their delightfully predictable happy endings, this series focuses on the complaints and frustrations that inform the couples’ conflicts and compromises. How do romantic comedies work to recognize and absorb various tensions, anxieties, and desires circulating within a particular historical moment? In what ways are certain intimate expectations, struggles, and thrills recycled across different historical contexts? The films in this series use distinct figurations of the couple–ranging from upperclass, estranged spouses to two heterosexual buddies curiously determined to take their friendship to a physical level–to engage issues of gender and sexuality, singleness and commitment, immaturity and maturity, romance, class, and parenthood.