Who's your baby mama

By Steven Zeitchik

God bless the Tribeca Film Festival. Or someone should. Where else can you see Jeff Zucker, a slew of gossip columnists, a host of "SNL" alumnae like Steve Martin, Jimmy Fallon and Chevy Chase, a battalion of Endeavor agents, and, just to keep it indie real, Killer Films' Christine Vachon, muttering to her guest about "how bad" that prescreening commercial from the New York tourism board was.

Nowhere, apparently, but for the surreal precincts of the Ziegfeld on Tribeca night, which in this particular year topped off the Jane Rosenthal press conference/opening remarks (more opening-night films over the last seven years for Rosenthal-De Niro go-to studio Universal than not, she noted) with a screening of "Baby Mama," the movie that seeks to add an important contribution to the criminally underserved genre of the concept pregnancy comedy.

In case you were wondering, Bobby wasn't at either press conference or opening-night festivities, reluctant, as he was, to face the post-CAA heat -- we mean shooting "Righteous Kill" really, really far away, in Connecticut, a full hour up I-95 (Patrick Goldstein -- not a fan) -- so the crowd was feted not with the sobriety of "United 93" of two years ago or last year's goofy earnestness of Al Gore and John Bon Jovi. instead, after the film said group went directly to MOMA, in what what we're willing to gamble is the venerable institution's first-ever time tricked out in giant baby blocks and plush teddy bears.

As for "Mama," it's better than the buzz has it. Yet again, Universal has another adult-themed comedy aimed at the kid in the adult, or the other way around. Writer-director McCullers (behind a few of the "Austin Powers" sequels) more or less pulls it off -- Amy Poehler gets to ham it up in her preeningly blue-collar comedy self, Steve Martin steal the show as a New Ager (even if he was poaching more than a little from Tim Robbins' crunchy pretentiousness in "High Fidelity") and that foul-mouther wiseacre from "40-Year-Old Virgin" offer his trademark tough love while engaging in offhanded weirdness like fixing a wooden owl (yes yes, we know he's Romany Malco), even if it all does dissolve in a puddle of goo at the end.

Nowhere else could you see a comedienne try on the fake-pregnancy apparatus known as a '"he-tus" and get huge laughs from a lot of people in suits. Nowhere but Tribeca, that is.