MORNING GLORY

A cotton candy Working Girl for the new millennium, Morning Glory is a fun and breezy comedy that somehow doesn't make your teeth hurt.

On paper, Morning Glory has rom-com pedigree written all over it: Director Roger Mitchell did Notting Hill, and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna scribed The Devil Wears Prada. Take a young, appealing actress full of spunk and sass, throw her into a situation that she can triumph over with sheer gumption, and, well, you've got another formula movie that still charms.

Rachel McAdams is the cute young thing with gumption this time around. Her Becky Fuller has just been let go as a producer of a local New Jersey morning talk show... just when she thought she was going to land a promotion! The nerve and humiliation! It doesn't take her long to pull herself up by her bootstraps and set her sights higher, like her dream job of working for NBC's Today show. But, well, fourth-rated network IBS's morning competition Daybreak will do as well.

As often happens in the movies, 28-year-old Becky blows into Daybreak like an over-caffeinated twitching schoolgirl, and single-handedly attempts to revitalize the struggling show. She hires cranky pants--no, SUPER cranky pants old-school newsman Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford) to work with longtime co-host Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton) to give the show a new reputation. Problem is, the two co-hosts HATE each other, and Pomeroy is so stubbornly resentful of being there in the first place, that he refuses to do "fluffy" stories (remember, this IS morning news).

Morning Glory is extremely predictable. Becky gets a hot love interest (thankfully NOT Harrison Ford, but instead Patrick Wilson, who knows how to work a pair of jeans and a t-shirt). And of course this love interest really adds nothing to the story except eye-candy on both levels, and serves to reaffirm the All-American Girl quality of the lead.

Unlike The Devil Wears Prada, which featured two great scene-stealing performances by Emily Blunt and Meryl Streep, Morning Glory has, well, a lot of nice performances. Ford looks like he is just playing the grump that we see in front of the press, and sure McAdams is perky and cute, but why oh why do I always think she is the same person as Elisabeth Banks? Is it just me? Having the most fun is Diane Keaton, for basically letting loose without having to play a crazed mother-in-law or quirky relative for a change.

But despite the fact that I won't remember much about this fluffy film for any length of time afterward, I still found myself enjoying Morning Glory. The lines were a touch more clever than you expected, and despite its predictability, the movie moved along at a pleasant clip. Morning Glory made me smile and laugh often, and sometimes that is just about the type of movie you can handle.