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The trailers make Little Black Book look like a romantic comedy, but it isn't that at all. It's really a movie about honesty. No—it's about choices. Wait—it's actually about moving on. Or maybe it's a movie that's trying to teach us something which even it hasn't figured out yet.
I've heard of tacked-on endings before, but this is the first time I've seen a tacked-on beginning. The film starts with Stacy Holt (Brittany Murphy) having flashbacks to her childhood with her mother and then her days at college. These scenes exist primarily to show us that Stacy and her mother deal with stress by belting out Carly Simon songs at inopportune times. Then the actual story abruptly begins, and we meet Stacy's boyfriend, Derek (Ron Livingston), a character who is never really fleshed out because he's absent for the greater portion of the movie. So when Stacy gets a job at the Kippie Kann show (the love child of Rikki Lake and Jerry Springer) and an assistant producer suggests an episode about digging through your boyfriend's little black book, Stacy has an idea.
With the aid of Derek's forgotten Palm Pilot, she dives into investigating his past, a search that ultimately yields surprisingly little insight into what Derek's really like. At regular intervals throughout, Stacy has bouts of guilt over violating Derek's privacy, and we're treated to voice-overs of her philosophical ponderings about honesty, choices, moving on, blah, blah, blah. Then suddenly, after the film has spent all of its momentum, it gives us a magnificent plot twist that condemns reality television and deserves better than the previous 90 minutes. But the film can't even commit to that lesson, and contradicts it minutes later when Stacy exploits her reality tale for personal gain in a tacked-on happy ending that ties into nothing else in the film, except the tacked-on beginning.
The film relies heavily on Stacy coming off as likable and magnetic, but no matter how many times she circles her puppy-dog eyes with black eyeliner, Brittany Murphy just winds up being forgettable. But even if she had pulled off her best Meg Ryan, there still isn't enough juicy info in this Little Black Book to make it worth opening.