Careful, they will suck your eyes out.Baby Mama is like a mini "Saturday Night Live" reunion, including a droll turn by Steve Martin at his best. The comedic lineup also stars former SNL head writer, turned mega star Tina Fey and current cast member Amy Poehler, playing off one another here as a 37-year-old wannabe mom and her foil, the trashy surrogate mother. The stand-in motherhood topic is always a hot one, as evidenced by its recent place on the cover of Newsweek magazine.
In the movie, Fey plays Kate, a single, successful businesswoman experiencing a sudden storm of maternal instincts. Since she is unable to conceive naturally, she resorts to using an agency for finding a surrogate mother to have her baby. As a well-meaning, type-A personality, she obsesses about everything to do with motherhood/babyhood, causing her to install over-the-top safety measures and devices in her home, while imposing strict dietary rules, creating some amusing consequences. Poehler plays the karaoke-crooning surrogate mother, Angie, who wolfs down Twinkies while constantly feuding with her dirtball boyfriend, Carl (excellently rendered by Dax Shepard). And although Angie takes a while to crank up the humor, by the time she arrives at the hospital, even her attendees can't keep straight faces.
Did You Say Placenta or Polenta?: And other questions for your Baby Mama
Rolling out the Clichés: Deception isn’t all that deceiving
it’s not you wolverine, it’s me. The most deceptive thing about this cliché-ridden film is the fact that it's masquerading as a legit thriller, with the filmmakers expecting us to fall for even the most played-out film conventions. Deception? How about tricking people into paying to watch this bomb…that's deception.
From the get-go Wyatt (Hugh Jackman) and Jonathan (Ewan McGregor) relationship feels staged. The "chance" late-night get-to-know-you antics and smoking pot are laced with excessive laughter and scream "phony." People don’t laugh that much with people they have just met, even if they're smoking killer weed. It's just not in our DNA, sorry.
Spring Cleaning: April industry roundup
patio time at the new Super b.Spring has sprung in the food and restaurant industry, even though our schizo Central Oregon weather is hardly cooperating. 12 O’clock Tart (www.12oclocktart.com) has started their Bend lunchtime delivery service featuring fresh, seasonally changing items. No prepackaged soggy sandwiches here. Choose from Peppered Crusted Pork Loin, Spiced Sockeye Salmon, French Nicoise Salad or homemade desserts.
Spring Cleaning: April industry roundup
patio time at the new Super b.Spring has sprung in the food and restaurant industry, even though our schizo Central Oregon weather is hardly cooperating. 12 O'clock Tart (www.12oclocktart.com) has started their Bend lunchtime delivery service featuring fresh, seasonally changing items. No prepackaged soggy sandwiches here. Choose from Peppered Crusted Pork Loin, Spiced Sockeye Salmon, French Nicoise Salad or homemade desserts.
Sum It Up: Dipping into the Dim Sum at Double Happiness
Eat a peach. When I was in college in Berkeley, I would emerge from the Ashby Street BART station and head directly for the baau stand. A minuscule woman would open the doors on her little wooden trailer and produce three to five types of baaus – warm, doughy and bursting with flavor. Although this was not my first encounter with dim sum, the experience sealed the deal. Since then, I’ve loved the Chinese breakfast food.
There are a few places in Bend that offer some dim sum items, but Double Happiness is the only place that does it as it is done in urban Chinatowns and the greater Canton Regions of China. Settled into their new Eastside location for over a year now, DH still offers the best dim sum this side of the Cascades.
It all happens on Sundays starting at noon. Diners receive two menus – the usual book form with all the combos and Americanized dishes, as well as a laminated photo of nine dishes denoted with the letters A-I.
Sum It Up: Dipping into the Dim Sum at Double Happiness
Eat a peach. When I was in college in Berkeley, I would emerge from the Ashby Street BART station and head directly for the baau stand. A minuscule woman would open the doors on her little wooden trailer and produce three to five types of baaus – warm, doughy and bursting with flavor. Although this was not my first encounter with dim sum, the experience sealed the deal. Since then, I've loved the Chinese breakfast food.
There are a few places in Bend that offer some dim sum items, but Double Happiness is the only place that does it as it is done in urban Chinatowns and the greater Canton Regions of China. Settled into their new Eastside location for over a year now, DH still offers the best dim sum this side of the Cascades.
It all happens on Sundays starting at noon. Diners receive two menus - the usual book form with all the combos and Americanized dishes, as well as a laminated photo of nine dishes denoted with the letters A-I.
Back With the Seeds
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Dig Lazarus Dig!!!
Mute Records
If I'm stumbling out of 7B (a quintessential drinking hole) and making my way down Avenue B, it's a record like Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! that flows through my head. The latest from Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds seems to bring me to that place - New York City. It opens with a drunken melody reminiscent of David Johansen circa 1973, closes with the Lou Reed inspired "More News From Nowhere," and in between travels across several sounds that are so Manhattan you can almost smell the street.
Big Star in our Little Town: KT Tunstall lights up the Tower with her Campfire Tour
Not even mega fame can keep the jeans intact.The West Coast leg of KT Tunstall's current tour takes her to historic music halls like the cavernous confines of Los Angeles' Wiltern Theater, the fabled stage of San Francisco's Warfield, and the supposedly haunted Moore Theare in Seattle. Oh yeah, and she's also coming to Bend to play the less than 500 seats of the Tower Theatre.
Tunstall, of MTV and VH1 fame, is one of the most commercially popular acts to grace the theatre's stage in recent memory. The Scottish folk-rocker rocketed to fame in the last three years with mega hits like the thumping power folk standard "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree," as well as the girl-power fueled sing-a-long "Suddenly I See." Last fall, she released Drastic Fantastic, a record that proves Tunstall isn't the flash-in-the-pan popper that some may have written her off as.
No Lab Coat Necessary: The rock and roll experiment that is Minus the Bear
Minus the bear brings their invisible trampoline sideshow to Bend.In the four or so years that I've been listening to Minus the Bear, I've always envisioned them as wearing white lab coats, all the time. On stage, in the studio, eating a grilled cheese sandwich - always in the white lab coats.
The Seattle band is often considered one of the premiere "experimental" rock bands in the U.S., which is the tag that first caught my attention, and also instilled the lab coat image into my brain. Minus the Bear bassist Cory Murchy doesn't wear a lab coat, or goggles, and, like the other four members of his band, shouldn't be cast as an Emmett Brown-like madman, tweaking massive amplifiers in a cluttered basement laboratory.
"Ultimately, we're just a rock band and making music that we're going to be excited about playing in the next couple of years." Murchy says before a show in Tucson as the band's tour heads west for an appearance at Indio, California's Coachella festival.
Our Picks for the Week of 5/2-5/8
Brook Adams & His Swingin' Marmalukeys
friday 2
This acoustic band plays an amusing blend of "cowboy gypsy party music." And if you're wondering, yes, we were inclined to give them a pick due to their pleasantly old timey name. But hey, the tunes are pretty good as well. 8pm. $3. Silver Moon Brewing Co., 24 Greenwood Ave. 388-8331.

