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film review

Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts in Mother's Day.Ron Batzdorff

One imagines Garry Marshall gathering his gleaming cast together early. "Julia Roberts," ol' Gare would shout to his pal from the Pretty Woman past, "I want you to ACT." And then to the Jennifer Anistons, Jason Sudeikises and Kate Hudsons of the world: "The rest of you," waving his hand, "not so much." Easy peasy for Marshall, who majored in television comedy and now minors in holiday-based ensemble-cast romcom confection (2010's Valentine's Day and 2011's New Year's Eve). Set in Pottery Barn America – affluent suburban Atlanta, actually – Mother's Day finds white people in May dealing with mommy issues of all different kinds. Aniston's cutely raging character, for example, struggles to share her little boys with an ex-husband's much younger new wife. Sudeikis plays a dad who stops obsessing over his dead soldier wife long enough to (hilariously!) purchase his daughter's tampons. And Roberts is Miranda, a celebrity entrepreneur who as a teenager gave her only daughter away for adoption. Mother's Day is a concocted market-driven holiday, and so is this M&M's-obsessed movie – candy for the sweet-toothed among us.

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