the flip side
by rantywoman
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/first-comes-love
Navigating through the New York dating scene and perpetually striking out with husband/father material, Davenport makes the life-changing decision to try in vitro by convincing one of her friends to donate his sperm. A circle of nurturing friends and family, all suggesting genre stock characters, surrounds the filmmaker with unwavering goodwill and enthusiasm toward her goal. Conversely, there are those in Davenport’s life who display skepticism toward her maternal ambition, even outright rejection in the case of her father, and because of the film’s superficiality they function more as antagonists. When the final outcome reveals a stable vision of single motherhood, Davenport and her son look down on the naysayers as they sit on the pedestal of “I Told Ya So.”
thebitterbabe 
Okay. I would say that Davenport received a primarily negative reaction from her friends and family, and those people, including her own father, played far more of a role than merely a “superficial…antagonist.”
Not to mention that Davenport is pretty open about her own shortcomings once she becomes parent. She doesn’t gloss over the plaster falling down in her apartment, or the fact that her son runs around largely undisciplined, or that her sperm donor friend remains ambivalent about his role in the child’s life. In other words, she doesn’t attempt to put a fairy-tale, sugar-coated ending on the whole thing, as this author suggests.
And don’t even get me started on this author’s odious, catty comparisons of this film to Sex and the City and its ilk. What, we can’t have a film about women’s issues without bringing up Carrie Bradshaw? Disgusting.
Thanks, I haven’t seen the film so I don’t have the full perspective. The positive review mentions that she doesn’t try to portray herself in the most flattering light.
Yeah, it’s not a perfect film (what is?), but I just got really riled up seeing the male reviewer trash the film in the most lazy, dismissive manner possible. God forbid he wastes his time sitting through two hours of a woman articulating her story about an issue that matters to a lot of people.