Ellie Parker

The movie has a depressing overtone as the main character "Ellie Parker", struggles to find her identity after plodding through various auditions. While the film quality isn't great, Ellie still manages to persuade the audience to feel for her struggles while she shuttles between auditions and the people who try to take advantage of her. It is perhaps one of the least glamorous roles that I have seen Naomi Watts play, but she still acts with the same conviction although sometimes it seems a little annoying and over-the-top. While some parts of the movie seem overly dramatic and a little unbelievable, it still reflects the versatility the actors need to have (such as mastering different accents and being prepared to switch roles quickly) and the little support that they receive during auditions, especially among seemingly disinterested producers.

As someone that spent 18 years in the city of Angels, I have met many Ellie Parkers. I adored this little gem, albeit low budget movie, with some of best acting one could feast their eyes on. The scene with Ellie in the car in a complete hyped up, Star Bucks frenzy, smeared with lipstick, banging her head to Blondie and madly shouting out " I wanna suck Vinnie's ####'!!!" in her New Jersey accent, had me rolling on the floor.

For those that know nothing of the dashed dreams of Many desperate Hollywood starlets, and the pure sleaze these women encounter as they try to fulfill their dreams, forget it, you just won't 'get it'. LA is a town, of big talking wannabes and 'Ellie Parker' really led you into that world with it's fake facade and empty promises. Naomi Watts just shines as Ellie Parker. She totally engulfs the screen with her magical expressions of pain, joy, angst, fear, confusion and loneliness.

I felt very empty after the final scene, just as Ellie did. The City of Angels changes you, makes you selfish, egotistical, and almost insane. Ellie knew her pursuit of acting had caused her to become a shell of a person, and as a viewer I really felt her pain.

So it was shot with a cheap camera, big deal. The messages where there, contrary to what many other reviewers said, you just had to be sensitive enough to pick them up.

This film really transported me back to LA, and made me shudder, thanks 'Eliie parker' for reminding me why I left!

Well, ...(I am rather hesitant to say this)....but, I suspect that this film's audience are people who are already in some way connected to the business. (Of making films, that is). (It seems to me that the humour is mainly intended for them).

-0-

However, I also want to stress that I did find Naomi Watts' performance outstanding!

Up until now, (as far as I am concerned), Naomi Watts has been, basically, "a pretty face". (And a very pretty face it is)! ;-) But in this film she really showed that she is really and truly an *actress*! (And a very fine actress, actually)! -I was impressed!

Karl Barkarson,

-from Iceland

"Ellie Parker" feels like an extended episode of "Unscripted" through the funny lens of Albert Brooks.

It does show the strains of being expanded from a short, for bits that feel like a "Saturday Night Live" routine, and for typical targets for actors -- acting class, slacker boyfriends, friends competing for the same lousy roles in cheesy WB and Fox TV pilots, pretentious indie directors (and I assume it was intentional that the guy looked like Jim Jarmusch), scheming casting agents, and phony producers.

But it still manages to very amusingly have some original takes on Hollywood. The funniest angle is that no one does know who they are any more, whether from class, day jobs, rapid-fire auditions, therapy, one-night stands of flexible sexuality and recreational self-medication drugs, so that they always feel like they are acting in the movie of their lives. And everyone seems to want to be someone else anyway, such as a night out to see Keanu Reeves wannabe rock star in his band Dogstar.

Key to the success of the movie is the amazingly versatile chameleon Naomi Watts. While I presume the short started in 2001 before her break-out in "Mulholland Drive" as a bit of envy revenge when her good friend Nicole Kidman was already getting big roles, it now seems like nostalgia because she's so beautiful here it's hard to think of her being dumped or cheated on and so talented as she morphs from tragic Southern belle to channeling Debbie Harry as a New York doll to looking astoundingly like the naive young Hayley Mills and a self-referential take on Marilyn Monroe that it's hard to believe Leslie Bibb would get a role over her. She has terrific best friend chemistry with fellow Aussie Rebecca Rigg (who I did not recognize at all from "Farscape"), making me realize how few films showcase Watts with female bonding relationships.

While the in-Hollywood jokes get a bit much and the basic arc is predictable, there are a lot of chuckles. Chevy Chase is very funny in a grown-up cameo as her agent.

I know this may come as a shock to actors, but job hunting is just as merciless in other fields so we civilians can relate to Ellie Parker's travails. It is very sweet that the closing credits include director/actor Scott Coffey's tribute to the strong women who inspired him, particularly his mother.

Scott Coffey's Life of A Lower-Rung Hollywood Nitwit, Ellie Parker, is interesting only as a showcase for the shape-shifter charms of Naomi Watts, a performing chameleon with an endless repertoire of faces (sultry, girlish, devious, ravishing, vacant). The film might actually be more worthwhile, and would certainly be more bearable, with the sound off, sparing us the interminable feather-headed nattering of its deliberately shallow, narcissistic characters, and allowing us to concentrate more fully on the thespic acrobatics of Watts, who, through the character of struggling, stubborn, wayward Ellie Parker, is afforded a chance to show off her near-freakish ability at sudden metamorphosis, going from harried phone-talking California twit to foul-mouthed gum-chomping Jersey girl and back, working the shift, the brakes like a race-car driver navigating the twists and turns of Watkins Glen. It's a show-off performance but Watts is not a show-off, she occupies the character of Ellie Parker fully, never tipping her hand. Her commitment to the role is commendable, her willingness to place herself in absurd situations, to unmask herself a little (some of Ellie's struggles are no doubt culled from Watts' own biography), but it's all in service of material that's not worthy of her, that cheapens her accomplishment, diminishes her. It's a thin gruel of a movie, lacking in insight, full of scenes that don't go anywhere, shot like a film student making an audition reel.