What To Expect When You Are Expecting Kirk Jones The story: Five couples in Atlanta deal with the joys and heartaches of getting a baby. Fitness guru Jules (Cameron Diaz) is pregnant with her dancer boyfriend Evan’s (Matthew Morrison) child. The Breast Choice boutique owner Wendy (Elizabeth Banks) is expecting one with her husband Gary (Ben Falcone). Gary’s father Ramsey (Dennis Quaid) is about to be a dad all over again with his much younger trophy wife Skyler (Brooklyn Decker). Food-truck entrepreneur Rosie (Anna Kendrick) unexpectedly gets knocked up by her business competitor Marco (Chace Crawford). Photographer Holly (Jennifer Lopez) and her husband Alex (Rodrigo Santoro) are looking to adopt a baby. The film is said to be inspired by the classic antenatal advice tome, What To Expect When You’re Expecting (1984). The best-selling What To Expect When You’re Expecting has been called the bible of American pregnancy – many mothers-to-be refer to it religiously. You might think that there is no way a guidebook can be adapted into a narrative film, and you would be right. But that has not stopped Hollywood from blatantly attempting to cash in on a well-known title. And it does so in the laziest of ways – serving up an assortment of pregnancy woes in a buffet-style movie. The five couples’ stories are an attempt to capture the spectrum of experiences that people have in getting a child from easy-breezy pregnancy to drastic hormonal mood swings; from those who get a bun in the oven by accident to those who just cannot deliver the goods; and even from the joy of carrying twins to the pain of suffering a miscarriage. The bloated film is further stuffed with sideplots such as Alex joining a group of dads to work through his mixed feelings about adopting a baby. With so much going on in the film, there is barely time for the individual stories to make an impact. Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine, 1998) does not help matters with his glossy direction, which only adds to the sense of glibness. After a while, the stories begin to feel like case studies. Remember the smart comedy Juno (2007) or the sweetly raucous Knocked Up (2007)? Actually, all you need is one pregnancy for a movie to get that glow. (ST)