Ellie Parker

If you are a fan of Naomi Watts, as I have been since seeing her for the first time in Mulholland Drive, you will not want to miss Ellie Parker - a veritable tour de force for the actor, who gives us not a caricature but rather a sympathetic, flesh-and-blood, 3-dimensional human being whose plight pertains not only to the acting world but to anybody who has ever felt rejected, misunderstood and/or unappreciated by the world at large. This makes its audience much wider than merely the 'Hollywood community' without ever becoming preachy about it, which I especially liked. Some of the scenes feel completely improvised, which I also enjoyed, and her audition scene near the beginning is more than worth the price of admission alone.

"Ellie Parker" is the sort of movie that you wish you could have made in college. It's funny, somewhat different, and has a beautiful leading lady, that of which goes by the name of Naomi Watts in this case. It also has an incredibly low budget.

As a matter of fact, it looks as though it could have been a college student's project. An hour and a half showcasing Naomi Watt's fantastic amount of talent as Ellie Parker: A struggling actress jumping from audition to audition with the hope of landing a part in anything she can get. Her loser boyfriend is no help, neither is her agent, and as the days go by, she loses more and more hope.

Whether she's cruising down Sunset Strip to her next audition, or yelling into her cellular flying down the 101, there is a part of us throughout the entire movie that wants to know what is going to happen to Ellie next. She's lovable. She's talented. She's been through more than we (the audience) can begin to understand. But most importantly, she's determined.

If you adore Watts as much as this reviewer does and you want to see her in something realistic (as close as it gets), check out "Ellie Parker". You won't get to see her like this in "King Kong." That's for sure.

With the exception perhaps of "King Kong," Naomi Watts has looked like total hell at some point in every movie she's starred in. She's a brave actress, one with Hollywood starlet looks but without any of the Hollywood starlet vanity.

One can't help but feel that she's somewhat wasted in "Ellie Parker," an offbeat, super low-budget film about one struggling actress's daily trials in that vast wasteland known as L.A. The film looks like the kind of thing I would make if I had a fairly high-quality digital camcorder and some editing software. But I do not hold the movie's visual style against it, and it's not for that reason that I think Watts was slumming a bit. No, it's the material that makes "Ellie Parker" a less than (o.k. MUCH less than) satisfying viewing experience.

Parker is going through an identity crisis, but unfortunately for us, it's not a very interesting one. She spends all of her time trying to be something that other people want her to be. Even when she's alone, driving from one audition to another, she's practicing lines and accents, and putting on costumes to fit a part. One senses that the filmmakers wanted to show the acting life as it really is for the majority of people in the business: a harrowing, degrading, grueling and exhausting process that leaves those living it adrift. As Parker says at one point in the film, she feels like her life hasn't started yet, and that everything is an audition for some future part. I'm not sure we need yet one more movie that deflates the glamour of Hollywood. I had a hard time not getting frustrated with Parker -- she chooses the acting life, so it's up to her to deal with the consequences. There's nothing stopping her from getting an unglamorous desk job like millions of other Americans who go to work every day and don't spend all of their time whining about it.

"Ellie Parker" does provide some fascinating glimpses into the entertainment industry, especially in a scene that shows Parker and her friend attending an acting class -- it goes a long way to supporting my half-serious belief that all really good actors must be to a certain extent mentally unbalanced. There's also a delightfully weird final scene that shows Parker auditioning to a living room full of stoned and bored movie producers, a scene that leaves you wondering how certain films ever get made at all.

But most of the movie feels underdeveloped and inconsequential, like a film-student experiment.

Grade: C

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!

I'd looked forward to this one, as most attempts at satirizing Hollywood life in the last two decades, both from studios and indies, have ranged from mediocre to unmitigated disasters. This one offered Naomi Watts in a starring role, and I've adored her since "Mulholland Drive", both as a terrific, versatile actress and as an unqualified beauty (they all seem to come from Australia and the U.K. these days, don't they?).

Well, Ms. Watts does shine in the title role, and she's in every scene, but somehow the film still falls flat. I'm not a big fan of film-making on digital video -- it always comes across to me like I'm watching someone's home movies, an experience I should be paid for, not that I should have to pay for -- but I understand why it's done in certain cases. In this case, it was a mistake.

Writer-director Coffey appears to be going for verite-style realism (I'm assuming he's not so arrogant as to place himself in the uber-pretentious Dogme 95 school), but he doesn't seem to realize that in order for any film to work, the result shouldn't come across as a home movie or, in this case, a student film.

Too much time is spent on Ellie in her car, doing all the things that Angelenos do in their cars because they're just too busy to do them elsewhere (applying makeup, changing clothes, practicing their lines, and the universal asshole-identifier, talking on their cellphones) and too self-absorbed to care how it affects their driving or those around them. This works as satire for one scene -- the next four times it occurs it feels just like being stuck in a car behind one of these narcissists, and it's not an enjoyable feeling. There's a related scene about halfway through that's amusingly ironic, but not worth the endurance test.

Just as with the interior car shots, much of the satire is overripe, pushing the irritation factor of nearly every character to its limits, testing the thresholds of both humorous exaggeration and simple tolerance. No satire should leave you wanting to burn the characters and their milieu to the ground (apart from "Day of the Locust", in which Hollywood does in fact burn, deservedly, but in context).

(As an aside, and for a chuckle, this may be the first time Keanu Reeves isn't the most annoying element of a movie he's in. But then, he appears only as a member of his band Dogstar, playing in a club, and he has no lines.) The other key problem is often endemic to film satire: it moves at a snail's pace. Unless you're the rare individual who's both an struggling thespian in Hollywood AND a caring, thoughtful individual, you will probably find yourself yawning a lot more frequently than laughing during this 95 minutes.

For all its drawbacks, though, this is a showcase for Naomi Watts to show how versatile she is, with the verisimilitude of her having to switch between characters, accents, moods, etc. The overall comment, that she doesn't really seem to be herself very often and has no idea who that self really is within the realm of all her "performing," is funny and worth exploring, but Coffey (or someone else) needs a vehicle that's more engaging, clearer about its objectives, and at least somewhat watchable.