Little Black Book (2004)

Too many fans seem to be blown away

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

I love this movie starring the late Brittany Murphy. Little Black Book was a romantic and true movie to watch. I bought the DVD of this movie and I watched it with my family and friends. We all loved it! Some of the movie clips were hilarious to watch. I loved the part in the film where she got nervous and broke the fax machine with her baseball bat. That part was hilarious to watch! This is one of my top favorite movies. The acting was good and this movie had a comedic and funny approach to it. It shows us that life can sometimes be a bit strange but we just go with the flow. I would recommend this movie to anybody who appreciates a bit of reality and a bit of comedy in between.

Forget this asinine 2004 film where a woman uncovers her boyfriend's little black book. The latter contains his previous girlfriends and so she tries to investigate.Our heroine along with her mother both live in a dream world where Carly Simon is the answer to just about everything. Miss Simon appears at the end of the film.Our heroine works for a reality show with Kippie Kann, a totally uninspiring Kathy Bates.Holly Hunter is her co-worker who turns the tables on Miss Murphy and uses her experiences as the basis for a segment on the show. All the former girlfriends and the guy are brought on the show under different pretexts. Naturally, this proves most embarrassing.The theme here that when a door is closed, another door opens just doesn't work.This is absolute frivolous nonsense.

From the female perspective, this movie is about women brutally screwing each other over. From the male perspective, it's about your seemingly perfect girlfriend turning into a psychotic bitch for no reason. Add in a spastic performance by Brittany Murphy, about 1/4th of the film being nothing but an infomercial for the greatest hits of Carly Simon and comedy that starts out at dog farts and goes downhill from there. The result is that Little Black Book is repellent to virtually every possible viewer.Stacy (Brittany Murphy) is the main character of this disaster. She would be pathetic as a real person and is even worse as a fictional protagonist. Stacy is overwrought, bug-eyed and empty of anything except an unexamined, childlike desire to work with Diane Sawyer. She gets a job at a syndicated talk show based in New Jersey, which becomes the pretext for an endless series of jibes at the low-brow, trashy nature of such programs. The only other thing in Stacy's life is her live-in boyfriend Derek (Ron Livingston). He appears to be perfect so, of course, Stacy isn't satisfied with that.Egged on by Barb (Holly Hunter), her fellow associate producer and the Friedrich Nietzsche of daytime talk shows, Stacy gets a hold of Derek's palm pilot while he's out of town and finds information in there about his old girlfriends. Putting aside how incredibly quickly the palm pilot became a dated reference, Stacy lies to Derek's old girlfriends to find out what she thinks he's been hiding from her. If you think that comes back to bite Stacy in the butt, you're only partly correct.I will admit that Little Black Book is energetic and has a quick pace. Holly Hunter also appears to be having a great time playing Barb. That's about all the praise I can give to this narrative malformation.I think I can sum up how awfully written this film is in one sentence. Stacy spends the whole movie acting like a manic, lying bitch and the audience is still supposed to be rooting for her at the end. How is that supposed to work? This thing was written by two women, but there's a scene in a gynecologist's office that could have come from the mind of a 19 year old frat boy. There's a cameo appearance by musician Gavin Rossdale that's so obtrusive and unnecessary it's like a 19 year old frat boy taking a trip to a gynecologist's office. The story casts Stacy as the product of a broken home and a self-absorbed mother, then brings the mother back at the end to cheer on her daughter as she achieves her greatest dreams, as though mom weren't responsible for most of Stacy's personal dysfunction.The glimmer of an idea in the sunken pit where the heart of this movie is supposed to be is that Stacy is the girl in the romantic comedy who gets in between the two people who are destined to be together. In this case, that's Derek and one of his old girlfriends. It's the old trick of taking the same story you've seen before and telling it from the viewpoint of a minor character. The difficulty is that most romantic comedies delight in making the Stacy-character as big a skank as they can, while this one desperately tries to make her sympathetic. It doesn't work, particularly since the film also goes to great length to portray Derek and his old girlfriend as utterly wonderful, despite Derek not telling his live-in girlfriend of a year that he continues to have ongoing friendships with two of his exes. If these filmmakers had made Derek out to be a bastard and let Stacy and the old girlfriend run away together, at least that would have been something.Little Black Book is 98% annoying, 1% cloying and 1%…well, I can't think of another negative adjective that rhymes with "oying". This is the sort of movie that ends careers, and it largely did that to Brittany Murphy's.

Watching this movie was a little black mistake. Starring Brittany Murphy and... well... that's really all I need to say, isn't it? The movie is bogged down by beginning-screenwriter-style exposition at the start, all of which screamed, "Sorry that I couldn't actually find a real movie to fill up this space, but this stuff is really funny and you can relate to it, right?" Now the opening sequence is supposed to make you like and care for Brittany Murphy's character. In fact, if that fails, the rest of the movie is bound to fail.It failed.I just didn't care about her and her pathetic little life. Party Girl did a much better job of pulling the whole "existential" story-trapped-in-a-woman's-empty-life and even Legally Blonde did a far better of job of using the love hook to help a character examine herself and how she values herself. But the ending and the changes as they occur in the film are all pretty contrived. Furthermore the direction messed up some of the alleged jokes in the film, accidentally giving away the unfunny punchlines before the jokes were thrown.Good job guys. In the end (and the beginning and the middle) the movie falls flat on its face, like Ms. Murphy's antics. I should've bailed on this one when I had the chance. 3/10.