Tuesday, April 22, 2008
More Surrogates: Special "Baby Mama" Edition
Baby Mama opens this Friday in the United States. Here's the full trailer:
Anthony Lane has a review in the New Yorker:
Forget the title, the target audience, and the taglines: what fuels “Baby Mama” is not the eternal quest for motherhood, or the topical conflict between parenting and careers, but an old-fashioned scuffle over class. Nothing places us on the social scale as accurately as our child-rearing, and one shot of kids being called across a sunlit playground—“Time for your playdate with Wingspan and Banjo!”—summons a world of liberal cuteness. Clean-living and high-earning, Kate markets gloopy green soup and other organic treasures to the discerning. Angie: “That crap is for rich people who hate themselves.” Oof.
More here and here. Fertility doctors are also giving Baby Mama mixed reviews. [UPDATE: Stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler discuss the stress of being a parent, the odd names stars give their children, and why Hollywood is suddenly so obsessed with pregnancy.]
Meanwhile, single men are turning to surrogacy to become fathers, the London Telegraph reports:
The bachelor pad is picking up its final modern accessory - a screaming baby.
Tracy LaGondino, the "pregnant man" who wasn't a man, suffers from gender identity syndrome, but I wonder what label the shrinks would pin on a man like Will Zangwill. Given that he's a Manhattan psychologist himself, what would Mr Zangwill call it?
He's part of a new trend in which single men are paying through the nose to have a baby via a surrogate mother.