"Baby-obsessed" Hollywood generally behaving like a 35-year-old woman freaking out about her uterus
Buoyed by the smash success of Uma Thurman’s Motherhood, Hollywood has officially caught baby fever!, or maybe it's just a touch of the colic. Today’s Hollywood Reporter asks, “Are babies Hollywood’s new obsession?” and while trying to define film trends beyond “pretty women are popular” and “big guns go bang bang!” is typically a fool’s errand, the answer seems to be a resounding, “God help us, yes, there certainly are an awful lot of baby movies coming out all of a sudden.” As Nathan Rabin cautiously, optimistically reported, eTrade’s Jim Henson’s Entourage Baby has been bandied about as one possible new project that should give bloggers several months’ worth of material, but THR—while casually commenting “that probably won’t happen,” those spoilsports—notes that “there are plenty of other baby-themed movies gestating,” which is probably some sort of pun.
But yes, holy mother of God, looking at this article there are indeed several dozen buns in the ol’ oven that have slid down the Hollywood fallopian tubes to be forced via a series of painful promotional contractions out of the studio uterus and onto the vaginal walls of your local multiplex, including: The Back-Up Plan, The Switch (formerly known as Jennifer Aniston Makes A Movie About Artificial Insemination, Because She Doesn’t Have Enough Magazine Articles Talking About Sad And Lonely She Is Without A Husband And Kids), and the documentary Babies, followed by the Robert Downey Jr./Zach Galifianakis buddy comedy Due Date, Katherine Heigl simulating maternal warmth in Life As We Know It, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s long-thought-lost continuation of the Meet The Fockers story cycle. So what’s with all the damn babies? THR has a theory: “America is two years deeper into recession and war, and unemployment is at stress-inducing levels, so audiences are in need of some comfort and Hollywood is eager to oblige. And what's more comforting than cuddly babies?” Well, drugs and casual sex, for one—but nobody wants to see a movie about that!