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Rhune
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Review: 'Uptown Girls,' downmarket mess
« on: Aug 15th, 2003, 1:07pm »		 Quote Quote Modify Modify
Review: 'Uptown Girls,' downmarket mess
Shrill noise and pig squeals
By Christy Lemire
Associated Press
Friday, August 15, 2003 Posted: 10:16 AM EDT (1416 GMT)
 
 
(AP) -- "This place is so loud, it's giving me a migraine," screams Ray, a precocious 8-year-old, over the din at a Manhattan nightclub in "Uptown Girls."  
 
She says this early in the film, but her proclamation is unfortunately prescient. Because nearly everything and everybody in "Uptown Girls" is headache-inducing.  
 
That includes uptight Ray (Dakota Fanning), her flighty nanny, Molly (Brittany Murphy), and Molly's pet, a potbellied pig.  
 
Molly squeals when she tries to bake cookies and sets the kitchen on fire.  
 
Ray squeals when she's forced to listen to rock music instead of her preferred Mozart (which she prefers to listen to with the volume cranked up).  
 
Then Molly and Ray try to wash the pig in the bathtub, prompting all three of them to squeal.  
 
(The pig, by the way, is a cute but gratuitously eccentric pet alternative to a dog -- which, by the way, this movie is.)  
 
When Ray met Molly
Ray, the daughter of a distant record company executive (Heather Locklear -- blink and you'll miss her blinding blondness), lives an obsessively orderly life on the Upper East Side.  
 
Molly, the daughter of a deceased rock star, lives in messy decadence on the Upper West Side. But when she learns her accountant stole her inheritance, she's forced to take a job as Ray's nanny.  
 
After initial noisy fireworks, the rigid, responsible child eventually teaches the free-spirited adult to grow up, and the free-spirited adult teaches the rigid, responsible child to loosen up.  
 
You saw this movie last year, when it starred Hugh Grant and was called "About a Boy." Both films even end with a feel-good mini-concert; this one's performed by Neal (Jesse Spencer), Molly's erstwhile boyfriend who recently signed with Ray's mom's label.  
 
But director Boaz Yakin lacks the nuance of Paul and Chris Weitz, and screenwriters Julia Dahl, Mo Ogrodnik and Lisa Davidowitz lack the insight of "About a Boy" writer Peter Hedges -- and they're a far cry from Nick Hornby, who wrote the book on which that film was based.  
 
Bad jokes, drippy sentimentality
Their idea of comedy is having Molly knock down the contents of a coat closet, or slip in the suds overflowing from a washing machine when forced to do laundry for the first time. Murphy gets banged up here almost as much as she did earlier this year in "Just Married," in which she played a bride to Ashton Kutcher's accident-prone groom.  
 
As in his previous film, "Remember the Titans," Yakin milks this movie for every drop of forced poignancy. But Ray and Molly are so two-dimensional that once they reach their inevitable understanding of each other, it's hard to care. (To see this dynamic done right, see "Freaky Friday.")  
 
Murphy, who brought a real spark to her earlier work in "Clueless," "Girl, Interrupted" and "Riding in Cars With Boys," has said she felt "a calling" to make "Uptown Girls." But between this and other recent shrill roles in "Just Married" and "Spun," maybe she should be calling her agent.  
 
And Fanning, who played a similarly precocious character as Sean Penn's daughter in "I Am Sam," has the enormous, intense eyes and bossy demeanor reminiscent of the enfant terrible Stewie from "The Family Guy."  
 
Now if only she could master the British accent and subversive sense of humor -- that would be a movie I'd like to see.  
 
"Uptown Girls," an MGM release, is rated PG-13 for sexual content and language.  
 
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Rachel
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Re: Review: 'Uptown Girls,' downmarket mess
« Reply #1 on: Aug 17th, 2003, 7:01pm »		 Quote Quote Modify Modify
sad... I was hoping Dakota Banning would do well! She is such a cutie!
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Re: Review: 'Uptown Girls,' downmarket mess
« Reply #2 on: Aug 25th, 2003, 1:37am »		 Quote Quote Modify Modify
actually, I saw this movie last week and it was pretty good.  My girlfriend loved it and I thought it was very cute.  Dakota's character was a little overdone, but overall I'd give the movie a 7 out of 10, or 3 stars.
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