BABY MAMA (Universal) Liz Lemon’s pregnancy scare in the second season of 30 Rock was funnier and more affecting than the entirety of Baby Mama. It’s hard not to root for Tina Fey, but it’s equally difficult to accept that someone with her comic sensibility could sign on to such an uninspiring assembly-line comedy. (Which, I hasten to add, she did not write.) Fey and her former Weekend Update partner Amy Poehler know how to play off each other, and the set-up — an apparently barren career-woman hires a fertile piece of trailer-trash to pop out a baby — is promising, but director Michael McCullers has no sense of tone and the film topples over into romantic-comedy convention (hello, Greg Kinnear!) and sentimentality. Extras: deleted scenes, alternate ending, making-of, commentary, Saturday Night Live: Legacy of Laughter featurette.
THE BIG LEBOWSKI (10TH ANNIVERSARY LIMITED EDITION) (Universal) Ten years before their alleged masterpiece No Country For Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen made their actual masterpiece. Big-upping The Big Lebowski has since become de rigueur but at the time of its release, this jokingly Chandler-esque caper about a stoned Marlowe (Jeff Bridges, who deserved an Oscar, or maybe the Nobel prize) attempting to unravel some tawdry Los Angeles intrigue was written off as “minor Coens.” You can keep your doomy Cormac McCarthy adaptation — I’ll take John Turturro as a (bowling) ball-polishing pederast and Peter Stormare as a German techno-star who does porn under the pseudonym “Karl Hungus.” Extras: multiple featurettes, including one on the annual “Lebowski-Fest,” Jeff Bridges’ photo book, production notes. Plus, the package is shaped like a bowling ball!
Also out this week
CHILD’S PLAY (CHUCKY’S 20th BIRTHDAY EDITION) (MGM) An accumulation of crappy (and more recently, mostly in-jokey sequels) can’t detract from the fact that Tom Holland’s original Child’s Play is a taut, nasty piece of work that compensates for its ridiculous premise (a dying killer lurches into a toy store and possesses a doll) with clever camerawork, smartly lo-fi special effects and a brilliant bit of voice casting: turns out that a malevolent, made-in-Taiwan murderer was the part Brad Dourif was born to play. Extras: creator/crew commentaries, making-of documentary.
THE FALL (Sony) This is not a Mark E. Smith concert film (alas) but rather a reportedly eye-popping fantasia (from Tarsem Singh, director of The Cell and the video for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”) that never opened in Canada despite bowing at the Toronto International Film Festival. Methinks the small screen will prove less than conducive to its outsized imagery. Extras: deleted scenes, featurettes, commentary.
Out Sept 16
Made of Honor, Speed Racer, Young@Heart and a Criterion edition of The Earrings of Madame de…, which is quite frankly one of the most gorgeous movies ever made.