OH, JENNIFER ANISTON. Always a bridesmaid. Your artificial insemination movie came out just a month after the far superior artificial insemination movie The Kids Are All Right. Where that movie is smart and funny and sensitive, yours is a boilerplate romantic comedy that’s notable only for its premise. Which is, actually, really pretty notable.
Jennifer Aniston is a fancy New York lady with a vaguely referenced job in television. Jason Bateman is her best friend, with a vaguely referenced job on Wall Street. By the ineluctable logic of romantic comedies, he’s in love with her, but because he’s a neurotic control freak, he doesn’t know it (in many ways reprising his Arrested Development character, he’s the funniest and most natural part of this movie). The boyfriend-less Aniston is worried that she’s reached the end of her foaling years, so she decides to go the artificial insemination route. Vetoing Bateman as a potential spermy daddy, she picks a donor and throws an “insemination party”—we are asked to believe this is a thing that happened in the early 2000s—at which a donor is invited to fill a cup with his “offering,” as the movie primly calls it. (Yes, it’s weird, and no, it doesn’t really make sense.) The offering is left in a cup in the bathroom, soon to be implanted in… you know, Jennifer Aniston. But Jason Bateman has had too much to drink. And some hippie gave him some drugs. And he sees the donor’s sperm cup in the bathroom. And he dumps it out. And refills it. And.
He insemirapes Jennifer Aniston.
The movie has no idea how fucked up this is.
Then we fast-forward seven years and there’s a kid and a romantic comedy happens and that’s really all you need to know.
Yikes! this is one hell of a fucked up review. I heard it’s a good one..so I’ll see it.
Why do Merc reviews always ruin the ending of every fucking movie? The good ones, the bad ones, the ugly ones. Your spoiler-revealing reviews, although consistent, are shit.
P.S.Fast-forward your life Alison… your dog dies.
@ lame: wow, that’s a lot of bile out of having a Jennifer Aniston movie “ruined” by explaining the set-up.
If it pisses you off that the reviews “always” do this, maybe you should maybe not click on them maybe.
The premise of this movie really, really bothers me. The idea that a woman could say to a man, “No, thank you, I don’t want you to be the father of my child” and then he could sneakily impregnate her anyway—that is not romantic! That is totally fucked up!
Also, I didn’t have room to mention this in my review, but Aniston and Bateman both have blue eyes, and the kid has brown eyes, and my 10th grade biology teacher told me that was impossible.
Everything in this review is in the movie preview. Nothing was spoiled, lame, unless you don’t watch previews either but if you don’t watch previews you should probably stop reading reviews.
A++++. I love you for that subhead alone. The preview kind of freaks me out.
Your fired.