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Mike Wilmington

By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, May 18th, 2012 - Comments Off on Wilmington on Movies: What to Expect When You’re Expecting
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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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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon