It’s a clichéd, tiresome vehicle, nonetheless,“I Don’t Know How She Does It” allows Sarah Jessica Parker to parade her singular energetic dizziness. Occasionally charming, frequently tedious and mostly meaningless, the movie tries hard to reproduce Allison Pearson’s gangbuster chick-lit novel of 2002, a sporadically trenchant look at the life of Kate Eddy, a London investment manager. Pearson’s book started its best-selling life in a newspaper column, as did “Sex and the City.” Kate of the column related amusing, even hilarious moments and days in her multi-tasking life as wife, mother and executive, delivering acerbic observations on her bosses and working equals (all men) and admitting her guilt over time away from family. In trying to re-create the intimate and confessional nature of the book, writer Aline Bros McKenna has used the tired convention of voice-over for Kate and look-at-the-camera talking heads for her female assistant, her best friend and for the stay-at-home mom who is her main antagonist. Oddly, only one tepidly underhanded male colleague, played by Seth Meyers, gets to speak on behalf of men. What is most alarming becomes obvious minutes into the movie: Kate is a mess. Rushing from her Boston kitchen to children’s school to office to airport to meetings in New York or Chicago or wherever,she is frazzled and often just shy of disheveled. The book’s Kate is very good at her job; this Kate wouldn’t last a day in the higher echelons of investment banking nor, probably, in the junior ranks either. And it’s not that Kate isn’t well-off and well- helped. She lives in an enormous apartment large enough to house several school classes, has an efficient, if willful nanny and is married to a husband (the charming and patient Greg Kinnear) who almost always seems to be home. Her assistant at work, the Harvard summa cum laude Momu (a standout Olivia Munn) is compulsively, if humorlessly, efficient. What keeps you from walking out of the theater 30 minutes into the film are the performances. Even dunked in this mess, Parker is charming — one forgets what a good actress she can be — and winning. Kinnear, given little to do and some truly banal lines, is the essence of patience and husbandly support. Busy Philipps plays Wendy, the “Housewives of Boston” stay-at-home mom, a woman who spends five hours a day in her gym (she only talks to the camera while walking a treadmill), and Jane Curtin contributes her acerbic delivery as Kate’s mother-in-law who thinks mothers should stay home. Best, perhaps, is Pierce Brosnan as Jack Abelhammer, the suave, widowed senior executive in Kate’s New York office who champions her investment idea and, oh, why bother, you know he falls for her. Brosnan reminds you about what calm, assured acting and timing can bring to even ridiculously simple-minded situations and lines. Director Douglas McGrath (“Emma” and “Infamous”) delivers a good-looking, brisk film with odd inconsistencies. His camera follows Kate through Boston’s financial district and across expanses of the Boston Common to be sure. But her house and street were clearly filmed in New York City; there is even an embarrassing moment when the camera pulls backward on her street revealing car after car with New York license plates. The movie has lots of momentum but no tension. You know what is going to happen from the get-go. Characters don’t develop, they just exist. And the ending is saccharine and sentimental, like the too-sweet candy that falls out of a pinata earlier. Surely working mothers deserve better than this. “I Don’t Know How She Does It” is showing in Millerton, Great Barrington and Torrington. The film is rated PG-13.
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Greg Fricke and James Boehmer, co-owners of Peggy Mercury in Kent, recently launched their first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts.”
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Fricke and Boehmer are not there to stock their shelves with the same products customers find at standard makeup retailers. They’re there to help customers find what works for them. That usually means asking customers about themselves and learning about their beauty habits, skin, style and the way they like to present themselves. Fricke and Boehmer believe it’s their job to help customers bring out the qualities that suit them and determine what works best for their look.
So much of the Peggy Mercury world is about emboldening people to become more creative, and possibly bolder, versions of themselves. Some of this comes through the store’s creative collaborations with artists, designers and stylists.
It’s part of an ethos that encourages them and their friends to use the shop as a kind of laboratory, trying out new creative experiments without knowing how they might turn out. Whether in fashion, painting, fiber arts or photography, the projects almost always turn out marvelously.
A line of sterling silver charms they sell started as a small project by their friend Nolan Percival. In the beginning, the pieces were for close friends and loved ones. But Boehmer and Fricke encouraged Percival to get a little more serious about the project and create a whole line for the store. Today, it’s one of their top-selling collections.
Classic styles, bold colors, and creative concerts make up the “Imaginary Concerts” line at Peggy Mercury.Provided
“Imaginary Concerts” has the duo taking their own advice.
The project started as a way for Boehmer to connect with his mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Taking old concert shirts from his own collection, Boehmer and his mother began cutting out the graphics with the idea that they would make a quilt together. Unfortunately, she died before they could complete the project in 2025. The pieces, which were ready for production, were put on the back burner as Boehmer and Fricke dealt with their loss and the whirlwind of projects that never seemed to cease at Peggy Mercury.
But the harsh winter of 2026 presented an opportunity to take some time and focus on themselves. Part of that meant revisiting and redefining the concert T-shirt project. This time, instead of looking to the warmth and comfort of a quilt, they turned to another passion — fashion.
Taking a page from their own book, they wanted to create something that felt comfortable to them. They took two disparate loves — one rooted in simple preppy style, with clean lines and classic silhouettes, and the other in the nitty gritty worlds of punk rock and pop — and blended them together to create something entirely new. Pulling from the staples of vintage Brooks Brothers and Charvet collections, they applied the graphic elements with bold stitching reminiscent of punk jackets of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but with a much more sophisticated air.
But the remixing isn’t just the pairing of prep and punk. The pieces are not canon. They take liberties with the realities of concert tours, combining one band’s dates with another band’s logos, mixing them all up until the reality is lost and imagination is the only truth.
Shirts from Peggy Mercury’s first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts,” hang on display.Provided
Adding to the mix is an element of perpetual creativity. Art can be messy, both figuratively and literally, and many of Fricke and Boehmer’s artist friends carry evidence of their work on them at all times. As a nod to these tireless creatives, the duo added haphazard splashes of bright color, giving the line an even more distinctive feel.
For them, “Imaginary Concerts” passes the “Peggy Test.” The mythical Peggy Mercury is a fictional figurehead for the company, a character who thrives on creativity and change. The name, much like the clothing line, is a mixture of interests: Mercury is a planet, a deity and an elusive, transformative element, while Peggy is the wonderfully stylish and boundary-pushing Peggy Guggenheim.
Everything Fricke and Boehmer put in their store has to pass this test: Would Peggy Mercury approve? For their first collection, the answer is a resounding yes.
Peggy Mercury is at 9 Maple St., Unit 2, Kent.
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