Liz Giel has joined BBDO Minneapolis as VP, director of strategy. Giel will work to introduce data to every step of the creative process, increasing the agency’s ability to create breakthrough, behavior changing work. She was most recently group planning director at Carmichael Lynch.
Giel brings more than 12 years’ experience to her new role. She has worked across a broad range of clients in retail, food and beverage, automotive and insurance. Prior to working at Carmichael Lynch, Giel served as a strategist at Fallon, leading brand and digital strategy for such clients as Cadillac, Cruzan Rum, and Travelers Insurance.
We have by now become accustomed to the lengths some movie characters will go to keep a good comedy lie going. But it's still a special kind of feat when Amy Schumer, playing a baby-mad single woman who fakes a baby bump in "Kinda Pregnant," is so desperate to maintain the fiction that she shoves a roast turkey up her dress.
You might be thinking: This is too ridiculous. The stuffing, alone. But if we bought "Some Like it Hot" and "Mrs. Doubtfire," I see no reason to quibble with the set-up of "Kinda Pregnant," a funny and often perceptive satire on motherhood, both real and pretend.
"Kinda Pregnant," which debuted Wednesday on Netflix, is a kinda throwback comedy. Like "40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Wedding Crashers," you can basically get the movie just from its title.
But like any good high-concept comedy, "Kinda Pregnant" is predominantly a far-fetched way for its star and co-writer, Schumer, to riff frankly on her chosen topic. Here, that's the wide gamut of pregnancy experience — the body changes, the gender reveal parties, the personal jealousies — all while mixing in a healthy amount of pseudo-pregnant pratfalls.
It's been a decade since Schumer was essentially launched as a movie star in the 2015 Judd Apatow-directed "Trainwreck." But "Kinda Pregnant," which Schumer wrote with Julie Paiva, almost as adeptly channels Schumer's comic voice — the one that made the sketch series "Inside Amy Schumer" so great.
The movie's opening flashes back to Lainey (Schumer) as a child playing with dolls and imagining herself a mother-to-be. So committed is she to the role that Lainey, in mock-labor, screams at her friend and then politely apologies: "Sorry, but the expectant mother often lashes out at her support system."
