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Shop Till You Drop?
Jeremy Lott on suburbs, bomb shelters, and bottled water
To Boldly Go
The End of Star Trek and Star Wars
Bioethics at the Movies
James Bowman on abortion, euthanasia, and Hollywood
Film and TV in Anxious Times
Thomas S. Hibbs on fantasy film, reality TV, and American life after 9/11
Memory and the Movies
James Bowman on remembering and forgetting through the eyes of Hollywood
Science Goes Hollywood
Selective Outrage over the Latest Movie Inaccuracies
One of Us
The Anatomy of Acceptance
Our Childless Dystopia
James Bowman on P. D. James’s The Children of Men, as novel and film
Immortality Lite
Ross Douthat on the sublime and the foolish in Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain
Techno-Horror in Hollywood
Japanese Anxieties, American Style
Sonny Bunch
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Blog Posts
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.
