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Uptown Girls
(Reviewed July 25, 2003)
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Man, it's going to be damned hard to pick a worst movie of the year when this December 31 rolls around. The competition already was tough enough, with cellar-dwelling swill such as the abysmally awful "Alex & Emma," the absolutely appalling "American Wedding," the haplessly horrible "Hollywood Homicide," the achingly unfunny "Anger Management," the misbegotten minstrel-show "Bringing Down the House," the gorge-risingly egregious "A Guy Thing," the krappy junk "Kangaroo Jack," the should-have-been aborted "Life of David Gale" and the pathetically preposterous "People I Know."
And now comes the infuriatingly, relentlessly moronic "Uptown Girls," a movie so bad on so many levels that one can only stare in stunned disbelief at its utter worthlessness. You think you've seen bad? You think you know how boring, stupid, soulless and intelligence-insulting a flick can be? Ha!
Brittany Murphy plays a rich 20-something New York party-girl ditz who acts so flighty, brainless and semi-retarded she makes Kate Hudson seem bright. When all of the dough that her deceased parents left her vanishes, she is left with no means of support and finds herself homeless, because the scriptwriters did not bother imagining that even orphans might have other family members. And since she is playing one of those skin-crawlingly annoying wide-eyed blithering idiots that we are supposed to find charming, she naturally cannot hold down even the simplest retail job without kooking things up. Ha-ha, look, she's caught curled up asleep on one of the beds in the linen department during business hours because she was out late the night before! Somebody hand me some paper towels, I think I just wet myself!
We are expected to believe that this unamusingly irresponsible fool is next hired as a nanny for another hoary Hollywood cliche, the amazingly mature wisecracking eight-year-old who needs to find out what fun is. Dakota Fanning is this angry, anal-retentive little angel, and don'tcha just know that somehow, by the movie's end, she and Brittany will learn a little something from each other about life and love and OH GOD, SOMEBODY GET ME A BUCKET, I'M GOING TO THROW UP AGAIN! SWEET HOLY JESUS, I CAN'T STAND EVEN THINKING ABOUT THIS MOVIE FOR ANOTHER SECOND! IT'S FUCKING TERRIBLE, MORE TERRIBLE THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY COMPREHEND! STAY AWAY! STAY FAR, FAR AWAY!
Back Row Grade: F-minus, minus, minus (to infinity)
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