Brittany Murphy Page 2

As the opening credits roll, we meet Stacy (Brittany Murphy), a young college grad heading out into the exciting world of low-budget television production. She dreams of one day working with her childhood idol, Diane Sawyer. And her mother loves Carly Simon. I don't know why the part about Carly Simon is important, but it's a recurring theme throughout the film. If her mother ever actually got any screen time, perhaps the Carly Simon thing would become at least marginally relevant to the story. But no dice. Even so, we're treated to several inexplicable Carly Simon moments that have nothing to do with anything, really, and don't add anything of substance to the film.

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The last thing I wrote in my notes at the preview screening of "Uptown Girls" was "could have been worse." I guess that means some part of me was somewhat charmed by this silly, weightless yet self-serious modern fairy tale of a dead rock star's impetuously carefree daughter who must come to terms with the real world when her accountant absconds with her inheritance.

But the contrived story gets by only on the middling magnetism of its stars: Brittany Murphy as flighty, Peter-Pan-syndromed Molly Gunn and 8-year-old Dakota Fanning as Ray, an uptight little rich girl who slowly loosens up when Molly takes a job as her nanny.

As they learn neatly packaged life lessons from each other and grow into more well-round people, the laughs are often predicated on either Murphy's pratfalls (beautiful actresses playing clumsy is Hollywood's idea of making them seem "common") or the cuteness quotient of a pretty blonde child wearing Chanel, listening to Mozart, acting snooty and speaking in multi-syllabic words she can hardly wrap her mouth around.

Continue reading: Uptown Girls Review

Leaning hard into ham-fisted mockery of beauty pageants and Midwesterners, "Drop Dead Gorgeous" is an exercise in frustration.

It's frustrating because this mocumentary condemnation of the objectification of teenage girls is ripe with thick, delicious layers of irony, but director Michael Patrick Jann -- whose background is in sketch comedy -- allows that irony to be beaten to death by cheap, madcap overacting.

Following two frontrunners in the fictional American Teen Princess Pageant, "Gorgeous" applies its comedy with all the precision of a paint roller. Wide swaths of disposable laughs come from parading the absurdly varied and one-dimensional contestants before the camera. There's a showtune freak with a drag queen brother, a fat chick, an American girl adopted by Japanese immigrants, a brainiac who wants to do a Shakespeare soliloquy in the talent competition, an interpretive dancer and a soccer dyke -- whose death in a farming accident sets up the plot, revolving around how far one girl might go to win.

Continue reading: Drop Dead Gorgeous Review