Baby Mama

A recommendation for "Baby Mama" from Carina Chocano who describes it as a "sweet-natured buddy comedy about two women learning how to be adults. (Baby Mama at the LA Times)

Baby Mama Synopsis
When single executive Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey) decides the time is right to finally have a baby, she hires a working-class woman (Amy Poehler) from South Philadelphia to act as her surrogate mother. However, Kate's careful planning goes out the window when the woman shows up on her doorstep needing a place to live. A comic battle of wills breaks out between the pair as they prepare for the blessed event and try not to kill one another in the process.

Opened April 25, 2008 Runtime: 1 hr. 36 min.
PG-13
Cast: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Greg Kinnear, Dax Shepard, Romany Malco, Sigourney Weaver, Steve Martin
Director: Michael McCullers
Genres: Comedy, Odd Couple Film

Standard Operating Procedure

Another "Critics' Choice" award from Kenneth Turan this week for Errol Morris' Abu Ghraib prison documentary "Standard Operating Procedure

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE" is not the first documentary on Iraq. It's not the first film on America's embrace of torture as a weapon of choice. It's not even the first picture to focus on the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. What it is is the first time Errol Morris has looked at these issues, and that makes the difference.

Morris, one of the world's premier documentarians and an Oscar winner for "The Fog of War," has done something quite unusual. He's taken the prison everyone's heard of, the photographs everybody's seen and the torture that people are either ashamed of or in denial about and looked at it all with such a fierce specificity that to experience "Standard Operating Procedure" is to feel as if we haven't focused on those things at all. (Read Kenneth Turan's complete review of Standard Operating Procedure)

Standard Operating Procedure
Opened April 25, 2008 Runtime: 1 hr. 58 min.
R - disturbing images and content involving torture and graphic nudity, and for language.

Director: Errol Morris
Genres: Law & Crime, History, Military & War, Culture & Society, Social Issues

Showtimes by zip for Standard Operating Procedure from Fandango

Jellyfish

Kenneth Turan gives “Jellyfish” a Critics’ Choice medallion writing

Seductive and intoxicating, playfully surreal and inexplicably moving, this unexpected Israeli film, which took the Camera d’Or at Cannes for best first feature, is almost impossible to pin down or even categorize. Artistic, daring, surprising, it resists fitting into words at all. Modern-day life in Israel is portrayed through the lives of three Tel Aviv women. (Jellyfish at LA Times Calendar Live)

Synopsis of Jellyfish by Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Israeli co-directors Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen's ensemble comedy drama Meduzot (aka Jellyfish, 2007) weaves together multiple seriocomic tales of intersecting lives, set against the deep azure backdrop of Middle Eastern seascapes. Affording equal emphasis to each tale, Keret and Geffen first hone in on Batya (Sarah Adler), a young woman employed as a caterer, whose firm places strongest emphasis on weddings. As the film opens, Batya breaks up with her boyfriend, and struggles with her supremely dysfunctional, argumentative parents, who correspond with her only by leaving periodic messages on her answering machine. Her life takes a most unpredictable turn when she happens upon a tearstained little girl (Nikol Leidman) who wanders out of the ocean, wearing only a pair of panties and toting an inner tube -- origin unknown. The foundling gravitates magnetically to Batya and refuses to separate from her.

Meanwhile, at Batya's latest assignment -- the Hebrew wedding of Michael (Gera Sandler) and Keren (Noa Knoller) -- the gorgeous bride breaks a leg while attempting to escape from a locked toilet, thus inevitably delaying her honeymoon in the Caribbean. Also present at the wedding reception is a Filipino caregiver, Joy (Ma-nenita De Latorre), saddled with an array of grouchy, snotty elderly clients who make verbal barbs in Hebrew that she cannot understand. In her private life, Joy struggles with geographical estrangement from her young son -- who still resides in the Philippines -- and remains completely aware of the irony that she's caring for nonfamilial dependents but virtually abandoning her own flesh and blood. And in yet another substory, Malka (Zaharira Harifai), one of Joy's octogenarian clients, gripes and moans about her own actress daughter's participation in an "experimental" version of Hamlet but demonstrates her own ability to reassure and encourage Joy. The ocean -- recurrent throughout the picture -- adds an allegorical layer to the proceedings; in the hands of Keret and Geffen, it symbolizes the narrative juggle of multiple lives, and the lack of self-determinism inherent in any -- the idea that all are wholly subject to the caprices of fate.

Release Date: Apr 4, 2008
Running Time: 1:18
Genre: Drama
Director: Etgar Keret, Shira Geffen
Cast:
Sarah Adler - Batya
Nikol Leidman - Girl
Gera Sandler - Michael
Noa Knoller - Kera
Ma-nenita De Latorre - Joy
Zharira Charifai - Malka

Jellyfish at Fandgango.com