I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to watch this movie or not. I liked the book a lot and sometimes the movies just don’t live up. Sarah Jessica Parker and Greg Kinnear, though, both really made it work.

Parker plays a woman juggling work and family. While she’s successful, she always feels like she’s behind or imperfect. Though Kinnear’s role was not big, no one does the pregnant pause as well as he does.

There were a lot of fun moments where Parker’s constant to-do lists popped up in mid air or were written on the ceiling that she stared at while falling asleep. I also enjoyed the moments when she spoke straight to the audience. That can sometimes work and sometimes fail. Here, like in the modernized version of Alfie, it worked very well.

Perhaps the best part of the movie was simply the fact that in the end, she did not have to give up either her kids, husband or job. She scaled back at work AND her husband began keeping the family to do lists. Not a hollywood ending, but a nice, realistic one.  A very endearing movie, one you might pull out each year to watch with your other girl movies like She’s Got Mail.