Christina Hendricks, Olivia Munn & SNL’s Seth Meyers Also Among Ensemble Cast
It seems that women — at least in popular culture — can never get their life together even if they have a perfect job, great kids and a loving husband. Chick lit and chick flicks have no problem continually driving this message home, pitching dizzy, exhausted women into a world where having to do more than one thing at once seems overwhelming.
Well, another picture with that heartening message is on the way and big surprise that Sarah Jessica Parker, the icon of preying on and exploiting women’s insecurities, is set to play the lead. “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” is based on British literary sensation by Allison Pearson about a high powered finance executive who also has to balance caring for her two children and maintaining a relationship with her husband, an architect (but who makes less than she does — quelle horreur!). Parker is joined by a starry ensemble that includes Pierce Brosnan, Kelsey Grammer, Christina Hendricks (yet another best friend role), Olivia Munn (a colleague) and Seth Meyers (presumably not hosting a fake news broadcast).
The film is set to be directed by Douglas McGrath, the guy who made that other, less noteworthy Capote film, “Infamous.” The film is set up at The Weinstein Company and will start shooting in January. If you’re just dying to know more, here’s a synopsis of the book from Amazon:
This scintillating first novel has already taken its author’s native England by storm, and in the tradition of Bridget Jones, to which it is likely to be compared, will almost certainly do the same here. The Bridget comparison has only limited validity, however: both books have a winning female protagonist speaking in a diary-like first person, and both have quirkily formulaic chapter endings. But Kate is notably brighter, wittier and capable of infinitely deeper shadings of feeling than the flighty Bridget, and her book cuts deeper. She is the mother of a five-year-old girl and a year-old boy, living in a trendy North London house with her lower-earning architect husband, and is a star at her work in an aggressive City of London brokerage firm. She is intoxicated by her jet-setting, high-profile job, but also is desperately aware of what it takes out of her life as a mother and wife, and scrutinizes, with high intelligence and humor, just how far women have really come in the work world. If that makes the book sound polemical, it is anything but. It is delightfully fast moving and breathlessly readable, with dozens of laugh-aloud moments and many tenderly touching ones-and, for once in a book of this kind, there are some admirable men as well as plenty of bounders. Toward the end-to which a reader is reluctant to come-it becomes a little plot-bound, and everything is rounded off a shade too neatly. But as a hilarious and sometimes poignant update on contemporary women in the workplace, it’s the book to beat.
