Movies

A mondo product placement in search of a screenplay, the conscious Working Girl homage Little Black Book makes the mistake of banking on Brittany Murphy, a Melanie Griffith look-alike with none of Griffith's gawky charms. After a co-worker suggests that Palm Pilots could be used as tracking devices for philandering boyfriends, TV producer Stacy Holt (Murphy) sifts not only through her man's PDA but also through his personal stuff (which she finds in a box helpfully labeled "personal stuff"). Said stuff leads Stacy on an odyssey of incognito appointments with her beau's past girlfriends—a model, a gynecologist, and a gourmet chef. But it's no fun to side with Murphy's mean-spirited paranoiac, so we're soon rooting for the gynecologist to uncover a venereal disease, or for the chef to whip up some salmonella, or even for that Palm cradle to fall into the bathtub. No such luck, but Little Black Book does put Stacy through a work-related wringer in its loopy third act. (As one of Stacy's colleagues, Holly Hunter does a gleeful inversion of her Broadcast News role.) If our heroine comes out unscathed, it's only because if she didn't, the Palms her movie is meant to hawk might not sell.