I saw this movie when I attended a free screening of it a couple weeks before it was released, and while I am no big fan of chick flicks, I had hopes for this film. The premise, a woman mining her boyfriend's black book and getting know his exes in order to get to know the real him, sounded interesting enough. And the following quote from Shakespeare (The Tempest) appeared on the screen before the titles came up:<br /><br />Hell is empty; All the devils are here.<br /><br />Ah, I thought to myself, this HAS to be a well-thought out movie, since the last movie I saw with a Shakespearean quote in it (Runaway Train) had been very very good. But I was wrong. This movie was to be a runaway train of a different sort.<br /><br />In Little Black Book Brittney Murphy plays Stacy, an aspiring associate producer on a female version of the Jerry Springer Show, hosted by Kathy Bates as an aging and worn out trash TV hostess. Stacy's boyfriend (Ron Livingston of Office Space) goes on a two week business trip and, if you can believe this, forgets his handheld device and calls her to tell her he needs a couple of numbers from it. She sees a name in the address list and starts to get curious about his former girlfriends.<br /><br />At this point, her bizarre chain-smoking overworked former bus driver and former something else (I can't recall at the moment) coworker played by Holly Hunter--who smokes everywhere indoors, which I haven't seen happen in real life since the late 70s--suggests she call one of the names from the handheld, a woman who just happens to be a supermodel (of course) who was on the show a while back, and stage a fake interview. But this fake interview is so that Murphy's character can actually gain info about her boyfriend's exes so that she can find more out about him while also doing the background for a potential show about little black books, but then it turns out later she isn't going to do the story about the black books, but then we aren't really sure. <br /><br />Are you with me so far?<br /><br />From this point, any semblance of a coherent story falls apart as she meets the other girlfriends but never really spends any time actually talking to them. Isn't she supposed to be talking to them about her ex? But no, she is only really interviewing them to come on the show for a different reason, so she really can't talk to them about her boyfriend, at least not directly. Instead, she has to lie and pretend to be doing something different and much time and steam is spent on side trips and watching the shocked look on her face. There is an undeveloped subplot involving the show's personnel as well as a nebbishy male coworker played by Kevin Sussman. The poor coworker's story seems to serve no other purpose than to use screen time, since the subplot involving him comes from nowhere and then goes nowhere. <br /><br />As a result of Stacy not being able to talk openly to the exes that she meets become even more flat and one-dimensional than they already are. On top of that, Holly Hunter's character is given more weight than it should be for such a poorly drawn character, but that is perhaps due to Holly Hunter's starpower.<br /><br />There are moments throughout the movie that drag on, and on, and on, and too many moments that were supposed to be funny just aren't. In the middle of a nice moment between the two main characters before he goes on his trip his dog passes gas. Not once, but twice. Har har. Sadly, the third act has a riveting climax that ties up a couple of loose ends but leaves us feeling cheated. By the time the movie finally finds a rhythm it is too late. <br /><br />If you want to see a relationship movie that is thoughtful, witty, and charming, see High Fidelity with John Cusak. The difference between the two is so great it calls up the comparison Mark Twain made between the right word and the almost right word: If High Fidelity is lightning, then Little Black Book is the lightning bug.<br /><br />1 Star