【凱特的慾望日記】是第三類的好看電影。好電影絕對要有好的劇本，好的編劇一定要聰明、要會說故事，要懂得去蕪存菁，要說話不打結，還要說幾句讓人印象深刻的話。看了I Don’t Know How She Does It這電影的人，會忍不住起立為編劇鼓掌。事實上今天的特映會放完片子，當場就有人鼓掌了，我也想鼓掌，但動作慢，趕不上前面鼓掌人的節奏，就忍住了。
In Douglas McGrath’s film version of Allison Pearson’s witty novel on the conflicted life of a working mother, the action shifts from Britain to Boston, where its heroine, Kate Reddy (Sarah Jessica Parker), is a hedge fund manager with two small children who finds herself on the brink of a career breakthrough.
She compensates for her office work-load by faking a home-made pie for the school “bake sale” and singing lullabies full of longing down the telephone line to her toddler. But when her husband (Greg Kinnear) finally has a career opportunity of his own, the couple’s high-wire act could end in casualties.
Parker has a likeable directness that makes one believe that Reddy is genuinely torn between work and family, even as you yearn for the character to cut herself some slack on both fronts.
Pierce Brosnan, too, is gently debonair as Jack Abelhammer, Reddy’s work colleague and partner in flirtation, although a greater sexual tension between them would have heightened the drama of a marriage in potential danger.
Still, mothers, in particular, will enjoy the details: head lice are great travellers, but they rarely make it into the movies.
In the Thirties and Forties, Hollywood was very good at making what it used to call “women’s pictures” – a term not so much derisive as descriptive of films that were designed to appeal to women but which also put their lives on screen.
Everyone knew that their pyjamas were never going to be as glamorous as Katharine Hepburn’s, their eyes as dewy as Greer Garson’s, or their hat as jaunty as Rosalind Russell’s, but they recognised a kinship with these women who had jobs, families and lives that were sometimes intractable.
Russell, in the striped headgear she wore in His Girl Friday, Howards Hawks’s magnificent comedy about newsmen and women, makes a brief appearance in I Don’t Know How She Does It, glimpsed on a television screen. It is only right that she should because in many ways Sarah Jessica Parker’s Kate Reddy is a latterday incarnation of those Hollywood heroines of old. They are rare in modern cinema, where women are usually ditzy blondes or cool-eyed operators but rarely both.
Reddy, harassed mother of two and astute investment manager, first made her appearance in a column written by Allison Pearson in this paper and went on to become the heroine of a bestselling book that has in turn become a major motion picture.
The humour has become broader and the central character softer, but, in Parker’s nimbly comic performance, she retains her essence: this is a woman who loves her job and her family and is trying to juggle the two.
The film opens, like the book, with the moment where Kate arrives home from an exhausting business trip, and is discovered in the kitchen by her long-suffering husband (Greg Kinnear) “distressing” a shop-bought pie to take to the school cake sale, because she doesn’t want her daughter to be humiliated by the home-baked offerings of children whose mothers don’t work.
From there Douglas McGrath’s movie fairly zips along, as Reddy’s life is thrown into chaos when she lands a huge business deal, developed in partnership with Pierce Brosnan’s suave Jack Abelhammer, New York boss of the Boston financial firm for which she works. We meet her best friend Allison (Christina Hendricks), a lawyer and single mother, whose domestic failures are more marked than Reddy’s own (she takes unset jelly to the sale); we see her unpleasant male colleagues, and her unsupportive mother-in-law. The script is sharp (“Trying to be a man is a waste of a good woman”), the mood both funny (as in Reddy’s first meeting with Abelhammer, where she discovers she has head lice) and touching (as she sings her children to sleep by mobile phone). The performances are an understated joy, particularly Brosnan, who convinces as the not-quite-romantic interest, and Kinnear, who makes goodness believable. The real pleasure of I Don’t Know How She Does It, though, lies in its assertion that women can adore their job and their family, and somehow make it through to the end of the day, with an acknowledgement of life’s imperfections. When did you last see that in a film?
Kate Reddy (Parker) devotes her days to her job with a Boston-based financial management firm. At night she goes home to her adoring, recently-downsized architect husband Richard (Kinnear) and their two young children. It’s a non-stop balancing act, the same one that Kate’s acerbic best friend and fellow working mother Allison (Christina Hendricks) performs on a daily basis, and that Kate’s super-brainy, child-phobic young junior associate Momo (Olivia Munn) fully intends to avoid. When Kate gets handed a major new account that will require frequent trips to New York, Richard also wins the new job he’s been hoping for—and both will be spreading themselves even thinner. Complicating matters is Kate’s charming new business associate Jack Abelhammer (Brosnan), who begins to prove an unexpected source of temptation.
潮媽都市日記 I Don’t Know How She Does It (2011)
影片資料
影片年份：2011 出 品 國：USA 出 品：Weinstein Company 發 行 商：Catch play 語 言：English 色 彩：color 音 效：
導演：
道格拉斯麥葛雷斯
編劇：
愛蘭布羅許麥基納
演員：
克莉絲蒂娜韓卓克 莎拉潔西卡帕克 皮爾斯布洛斯南 凱西葛雷莫 葛雷肯尼爾
A comedy centered on the life of Kate Reddy, a finance executive who is the breadwinner for her husband and two kids.
影片資料 
Gitzel Giuliette Natal Care Hong Kong 嬌姐專業陪月服務團隊香港 