Little Black Book is a film that I went in expecting to like, in spite of it's mediocre notices and the fact that I watched it within 3 hours of my virgin screening of Napoleon Dynamite - a film I will no doubt see dozens of times again. I expected to like it because I have a bit of a thing for Brittany Murphy (one of these days she's going to pick a role that makes believers of everyone) and it also stars Ron Livingston from Office Space which is another film that I've seen dozens of times. Throw in the dependable duo of Holly Hunter and Kathy Bates and how far wrong can you go?

As it turns out you can go pretty far wrong, but again Murphy's off-beat rhythm and undeniable charm salvages the film from it's own sit-comikaze tail-spin well enough for me to give it a guilt-ridden, shaky thumbs up. (I gave Uptown Girls a C+ using the same flimsy rationale). Murphy has a way of delivering a line with just a slightly different spin than you're expecting and I'm a sucker for it.

As the film opens, Stacy (Brittany Murphy), an aspiring television journalist, lands an associate producer position on a once-respectable talk show hosted by Kippie Kann who is wonderfully fleshed out by Kathy Bates. She's also embarking on a great new relationship with Ron Livingston who is dreamy, but oddly reluctant to discuss his past relationships. A minor quibble until one of his ex-flames makes an appearance on the show (she's a bulimic model) - and fires off a SCUD missle or two in the direction of Livingston's dating history and/or moral rectitude. With the seeds of doubt now in fertile soil and Livingston conveniently out of town for a few days, Murphy, with a lot of prompting from her co-workers (Hunter) and (Kevin Sussman) decides to use her new beau's new-age black book to investigate his true nature.

Under the auspices of booking guests for future shows Murphy tracks down her boyfriends past girlfriends and gives them kind of a pre-show interview and of course comedy mayhem ensues. As it turns out, two of these women, a successful gynecologist (Rashida Jones) and a chef named Joyce (Julianne Nicholson) are still carrying a torch for Livingston.
With Hunter on board and Murphy's loopy charm not-unlike Melanie Griffith's there are definitely similarites here to both Broadcast News and Working Girl (in fact, the latter is Stacey's all-time favorite movie.) Little Black Book is not in the same league as either of these classics but at least it has the sense to steal from good material.

As the trailers suggest, eating from the tree of knowledge is still a bad moral move and the more she learns form Livingston's girly-gadget the more she wishes she would have left Pandora's Black Box alone. Then again, what kind of aspiring television journalist would she be if she doesn't follow these juicy leads. On the other hand all she really uncovers in her investigation are some relatively minor white lies, and considering the lengths she has gone to obtain the information whose character is really the one at issue? These are the kind of moral forks in the road the film invites us to ponder and while it certainly is an eye-opener the film could have been a whole lot better were it not written in such a sit-com style - and had it been funnier.

Sadly there is a remarkable absence of chemistry between Murphy and Livingston. True, they have precious little screen time together - still nothing genuine comes across. The best relationship in the film develops between Hunter's world-weary character and Murphy. These two carry the film along and keep it jaunty and fun, and Bates is a hoot as a Sally Jessy Raphael-type hoping for a one-way ticket back to the big time.

The thing that really saves this movie is some rather unexpected plot twists toward the end that I cannot reveal lest I spoil everything - let's just say the film goes in a different direction than you would imagine. The ending brings a pretty drastic change in tone, and while it kept the film from being an exercize in predictable, instantly disposable fluff, it does kind of derail Murphy's performance. I guess this is only fitting that the ending should be a double edged sword, because the movie spends much of it's running time examining the double-edged sword of modern technology.