Sarah Jessica Parker to Play a Rich Manhattanite?!

WHAT?! Well, sort of. Actually, she'll play a rich Manhattanite who loses her high-paying job and posh Upper East Side apartment and decides to start a business helping rich New Yorkers get their kids into elite kindergartens. (Knowing someone who worked as an admissions officer at an elite kindergarten, this is not shocking to me.)

The movie is The Ivy Chronicles, based on a novel by Karen Quinn, and it will have to fight off the immediate impression that it's an epic fantasy film. In fact it's pitched as a comedy in the vein of The Devil Wears Prada and The Nanny Diaries.

For more specifics, there's this from a Publishers Weekly book review of The Ivy Chronicles: "Quinn's characters are unapologetically shallow, two-dimensional cartoons designed to affably lampoon the silliness of New York's elite, giving readers ample opportunity to snicker at people like a newspaper mogul willing to pay off the FDA to get her demon child into a 'baby Ivy' league kindergarten and other wealthy, overly successful parents who use their kids to channel ambition and perpetuate elitism." Hey -- it sounds like Sex and the City if Sex and the City had realized that its characters were unapologetically shallow, two-dimensional cartoons!

I like Sarah Jessica Parker best when she has fun with her catty, uptight image, like in her clever performance in The Family Stone, for example. This could be another instance of that -- or it could be really, really tiresome. But Sex and the City's box-office take certainly justifies it.