MBunge 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.

A F For those expecting a complete chick flick, you may be disappointed.The movie started out looking very soft and light, but as it progressed, you were immersed into the lives of strong, funny and independent women. You were drawn into complex female characters, a rarity in the industry, who were neither good nor evil.I loved the movie, as it was not just about the girl getting the guy, but it examined many of the lies that we surround ourselves with. The story had many twists, with witty, and insightful looks into the lives of the women.And I loved the ending.

dej99 I watched this movie because I like many of the actors: Holly Hunter, Kathy Bates, and Ron Livingston. Brittany Murphy is cute and appealing. But every scene was excruciatingly painful and there was nothing to redeem the film. The narration (by the main character) was trite, the plot was thin, and too much time was spent on the behind-the-scenes of a trashy daytime talk show (we all know that these shows are drivel and the producers lack integrity---please tell us something that we don't know). If it weren't a lazy Sunday morning, I would have certainly changed the channel. Please, don't be fooled, and don't waste your time. I have never bothered to review a movie based on how negatively I feel about it, but this movie took the cake.

JonWatches **Spoiler is not especially spoiling.** Wanting to see this film since noticing the one-shot poster at the theater, I nonetheless figured it was just because of Brittany's looks. Since I pretend to have too much self-respect to see a film based on that alone I didn't watch it until the DVD was too cheap to pass up, and I'd heard that it wasn't just another boppy romantic comedy.By waiting so long I almost missed out on a really good film. It certainly isn't just another romantic comedy. In fact, Murphy channels Drew Barrymore in a quaint mix of His Girl Friday styled patter and modern over-obvious humor while the film packs a punch with a dark side spearheaded by Holly Hunter, whose performance unifies a character of such scattered motives and needs that the result is downright bewitching to behold.The film isn't a girl-catches-guy-cheating (oh, but really he's not, happy ending, wahoo) story. It's a girl catches (the) reality (of) cheating story. You can hear the screenwriters' gears stripping with the otherwise useless voice-overs by Murphy to keep the audience going with the film as it trashes expectations. Had I been on a date, I might have thrown popcorn. But truth is the film is deep.Does Stacy (Murphy) come to find out how slick and untrustworthy men are, or does she really just come face-to-face with "knowing too much," and learn how decisions become unmakeable in the light of too much understanding about how we always know too little about what's just beyond the life we lead? The main character here is flawed, lovely, likable, and gets genuinely hurt not just by her man, but by her eating of the forbidden fruit, symbolized by the Palm Pilot little black book. It's not simplistically knowing that her boyfriend is "still out there" with other women, but it's knowing (and respecting or even liking) the personalities of those women. Here Julianne Nicholson really comes to the fore with a portrayal of ex-girlfriend Joyce, who bonds tightly with both Murphy and the audience.Bonding, in fact, happens everywhere. The energy within the cast is remarkable. Hunter's bond with Murphy is so compelling that given their age difference there is a slight sexuality to it...sort of as if Hunter's extra years grants her a worm-hole to masculinity that she slides through with a school girl's youthful vibrancy.By breaking the genre the film is, in a sense, necessarily flawed. Knowing that, the final ending is at once corny and recognizably required to stop the audience from burning down the concession stand. But given a chance to see Hunter enraptured at the end as she creates her life's great piece of performance art makes the broken promise of the one-shot that attracted me well worth suffering.