MOVIE REVIEW - I Don't Know How She Does It

If you're planning on going to see the new I Don't Know How She Does It, you had better like Sarah Jessica Parker. Because you get a huge overdose of her here.

This movie is a good idea. Inventing a character that is an image of the young professional mother and her plight to keep her head above water. And see how she juggles is all and keeps it together. That would have been fine if you could have really related to her. If she had more than one thing in common with the audience she is supposed to be a mirror image of. But here she's not. The only thing she has in common, is that she is a mother. Her life is not most people's life.

Meet Kate (Parker). She is a mother of 2 young kids, and has a nice husband. She lives in Boston and works for a high powered finance company. She is working on a huge work project where she travels all over with Jack (Pierce Brosnan). He is the head of the finance company and together they are working on an ambitious project, and Kate is on the verge of having an entire Investment fund named after her. Along the way, she neglects her kids, takes advantage of her spineless husband (Greg Kinnear), and generally makes a mess of her personal life for professional gain. And this is a comedy. In the end of course she makes it all right, what a surprise.

This is after Jack of course makes a play for her, and she practically ruins all major relationships in her life. But that's not the real trouble here. This is just bad. Parker is hard to watch on screen. She's not really funny, or anything enjoyable. Plus she's still Carrie Bradshaw, where she was great. The reason she was so good in Sex And The City TV show, was that it was a fantasy. It was not really reality. She even narrates a bunch of this movie like Sex And The City, and it doesn't work. In fact, many characters in this movie do narration parts, and that's movie making gone by. It doesn't work.

This quite frankly is a painful 90 minutes. You have to like watching East Coasters talk on the cell phone, live in total chaos, trample over people, make a mess of it all, and put it all back together. If that's your thing, you're good. Even though you may see some similarities, many will not totally identify with Kate. She is above the audience. Big flaw.

This flick is a good idea, but you have to make characters that look like those going to see the movie. This may play well in New York, or Boston, but not most places. These characters just look selfish, self centered and ridiculous. Honest observation, there was one out loud laugh in the whole theater, and it was the last 2 seconds of the movie. True.

I Don't Know How She Does It. Nice try. Swing and miss.