'Little Black Book' is no page-turner

By Eleanor O'Sullivan
Asbury Park (N.J.) Press

LITTLE BLACK BOOK (PG-13) Brittany Murphy plays a woman bent on digging in her boyfriend's past. Also starring Holly Hunter and Kathy Bates. Nick Hurran directs. Columbia, 105 minutes.

Will anyone believe that Brittany Murphy's character, Stacy, a college graduate and TV producer, is so dumb that she doesn't know she is being cruel when she sets up her boyfriend's ex-girlfriends for public humiliation? Stacy gets a job on a reality TV show that makes fun of people and has the audience salivating for more humiliation.

Is the presumption here that American reality TV watchers will embrace this film version of reality TV because they're immune to (i.e., too stupid to feel) other people's pain?

"Little Black Book," by the way, is meant to be a romantic comedy about a woman digging into her boyfriend's past.

Will anybody believe that Holly Hunter, looking wan and uncomfortable, could go from brilliant performance as a TV producer in "Broadcast News" to embarrassingly bad performance as producer of the reality TV show and not know she's terrible? Hunter's so overreaching as the woman who will do anything for a rating point, she makes Faye Dunaway's "Network" executive look kindly.

The whole tone of "Little Black Book," which refers to the boyfriend's handheld computer with telephone numbers and personal data, is seedy, mean-spirited and oddly unrealistic.

Kathy Bates, as the reality TV host, is all dolled up with a blown-dry hairdo, heavy make-up and "coordinated" wardrobe, and she's meant to be a terror on stage and in the control booth. But poor Bates, an Oscar winner, has nothing in the way of dialogue to work with. All set to rant and rave about some technical miscue, she storms into the control booth, then spews out some nonsense. How stupid is that?

Perhaps the point of the movie is that men and women shouldn't keep secrets from each other and that they should share their concerns. Murphy's character is convinced her boyfriend (Ron Livingston) is cheating on her, hence all her schemes to get chummy with his ex-girlfriends. It all blows up in her face in the end, very publicly.

But even a stupid person knows you can't hurt people and get away with it, forever. "Little Black Book" says that these days you'll not only get hurt, but the world will glory in your pain on television. Now that's really stupid, especially for a movie pretending to be a comedy.

PG-13 for sexual content, profanity.