Grade:        F

Moral:        “My avatar is dressed like a whore.”

Banal and reheated to the point of dripping down the screen like unwanted cottage cheese, Baby Mama is yet another salvo from the bourgeoisie superstructure, their skeletal fists still around the throat of pop-culture, squeezing and choking until one can only wheeze out of the theater, desperately clinging to the fact that surely audiences won’t buy dramatic-tension surrounding a character who purchases a $100,000 surrogation without even sniffling. That surely they wouldn’t buy a movie that surrounds said tragic hero with: one (1) black character who speaks entirely in jive (thus delivering us the witty title; I suppose there’s also the quick shot of a black trainee who can’t figure out a blender); two heinously overplayed po’ folk, both unceremoniously trotted out to be hee-hawed at, because man, those assholes don’t even know how to pronounce French architectural terms; and of course the hunky guy, who solely legitimatizes the protag’s progressivity by telling her it’s OK to have children without being married, which of course immediately convinces her to marry him; cut to fucking credits.

It’s depleting to walk into a theater, a venue of entertainment, expression, communication, whatever, and instead find oneself assaulted by the hoary bullshit of people with no artistic merit or aspirations, no feel for cinema, no interest in narrative or dialog, and a rendering of the human condition so punch-drunk on privilege and insulated towards anything but the Bottom Line that one wonders if the pricks in The Player were really caricatures at all. We live in a culture in which not only does the emperor have no clothes, he’s making the goddamn art, too. That Baby Mama is listingly unfunny is almost immaterial in light of how smugly and happily unfunny it is, as if it was fully unaware that its quality, its cultural currency, and its filmic value are all pretty irrelevant, so long as it doesn’t ruffle anyone’s narrow preconceptions.

It’s a movie you pay to see, only to discover it’s really just a 90-minute commercial for Red Bull and some stupid American Idol video-game. It’s a movie of veiled, stratified contempt, wherein "Japanese kids" are a baseline measure of idiocy and a diatribe on "black kids" lands with such a reverberative thud that you can hear the tumbleweeds. It sacrifices Tina Fey (who once made even Mean Girls passable) to the altar of post-feminist shucking, and more egregious, it flattens Amy Poehler, as if in punishment for her long-past involvement in the stunning “Upright Citizens Brigade” (the scorched-earth antithesis to this crap). And then, in its closing shot, it gives us a parting image so bleakly appropos that it fairly well does my job for me: a baby’s little undeveloped fingers, squinched together and encircled by a wedding band, its inculcation already sealed.