A true com­edy auteur, Tina Fey’s act­ing has always come in tan­dem with her own writ­ing. This dou­ble act has pro­gressed from improv com­edy at The Sec­ond City, to head writer for Sat­ur­day Night Live, to sup­port­ing player in the fea­ture film Mean Girls, (for which she wrote the screen­play), and finally to exec­u­tive pro­ducer and star of her own sit­com 30 Rock.

Baby Mama, writ­ten and directed by Michael McCullers, marks Fey’s first star turn in a project which she did not orig­i­nate or write. Still, it cer­tainly feels a lot like a Tiny Fey joint. Judg­ing by the gen­eral tone and the chaotic improv of Fey’s partner-in-crime Amy Poehler, I sus­pect the two enhanced the pro­duc­tion with a fair amount of script-doctoring. Indeed, Fey’s char­ac­ter fits firmly in the pub­lic per­sona of Endear­ingly Neu­rotic Thir­tysome­thing Sin­gle Girl estab­lished on SNL’s Week­end Update, as Ms. Nor­bury in Mean Girls, and as Liz Lemon in 30 Rock. The Tina Fey Not­lash notwith­stand­ing, she is evi­dently more grounded in real life, and mar­ried with a child. Mean­while, the fic­tion­al­ized “Tina Fey” is the idol of every girl with glasses and crush of every boy with… uh, glasses.

Well, excu­u­u­u­u­u­u­u­u­use me!

Fey must have an impres­sive rolodex, for like her flag­ship TV show 30 Rock, nearly every lit­tle role is Baby Mama is filled by a famil­iar face. When not being amused by alumni from The Daily Show and SNL, we’re treated to Steve Mar­tin as a wild and crazy organic food mag­nate and Sigour­ney Weaver as an ini­tially creepy but ulti­mately sym­pa­thetic fer­til­ity doc­tor. But per­son­ally, I wouldn’t dare make fun of Sigour­ney Weaver’s age, lest she come after me with a flamethrower or a space fork­lift.

Trashy and takin’ out the trash

Offi­cial movie site: www.babymamamovie.net

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