What to Expect

What to Expect When You’re Expecting, second half funny, first half not so. I don’t know what I expected when we went to see this movie, probably another bodily-function comedy, this time centered on breast feeding and pregnancy instead of the usual anal/penile wit. Well, it was that in a lot of ways related to pregnancy and childbearing/rearing—hurling, farting, water-breaking, hemorrhoids, boob aches, wetting oneself, circumcision pros and cons. But it wound up being more than just that, genuinely funny here and there. And we weren’t subjected to any of the headboard banging and butt pumping of so many recent flicks. There were six loosely connected storylines, five couples and the group of baby-walking men led by Chris Rock with his four little ones which included the funniest little stumbler named Shannon. Jennifer Lopez and her husband couldn’t conceive, so they adopted a boy from Ethiopia. Jules (Cameron Diaz) and Evan (Matthew Morrison), she a weight-loss tv guru and he a dance show partner of Jules, get pregnant but argue about circumcision, she yes, he no. Cooper senior (Dennis Quaid), a famous ex-race car driver, and his perfect young wife (Brooklyn Decker) are having twins, once again one-upping Cooper junior and his wife Wendy (Elizabeth Banks). Wendy owns a shop promoting breast feeding and Gary (Ben Falcone) starred in Jules’ Biggest Loser show. The fifth plot strand has Rosie (Anna Kendrick) and Marco (Chace Crawford), competing food truck operators, accidentally conceiving after a one-time bang on the hood of her Beetle. They stay together until she has a miscarriage, then go their separate ways until the inevitable reunion at show’s end. All in all, a rather forgettable flick, cliché-filled and totally unrealistic, but with enough chuckles and outright laughs to fill out an otherwise empty afternoon.