Ellie Parker [2006]

Customer Reviews:

Ellie Parker.......2007-07-23

This has got to be the worst film i have ever watched! In fact i couldnt watch it all the way through. I wasted an hour of my sunday afternoon watching this rubbish! What the hell is it about?

Superb low budget vehicle for Naomi Watts talents........2006-10-06

Ellie Parker is a young actress losing her fight to gain just a toehold on the bottom rung of the Hollywood ladder. Dashing from audition to audition, her hectic life is centred in her car, dangerously changing and making up and phoning as she is driving.

The core of the film is identity in all senses, the loss of identity when an actor is continuously preparing wildly different roles, her hectic pursuit of a film part disrupting her private life and relationships, everything that happens further erodes her self belief. At one point she longs for a really challenging role "like a blind lesbian anthropologist in the 1700s."

Watts carries the entire film acting superbly even when the material is rather thin due to the film having starting life as a short produced by Naomi and a few friends. Even the car used is Watts own Honda.

It is not a deep psychological study of lost identity, rough edges there may be, but it is an engrossing slice in time drama of a young woman desperately seeking identity.

"I don't know who I am,".......2006-04-16

Who knew that someone could do so much while driving his or her car? Ellie Parker (the lovely Naomi Watts) has raised multi-tasking to a new level. None of what she does looks remotely safe so I wouldn't recommend you try what she pulls off so adeptly in her whirlwind drive around the hills and studios of Hollywood for auditions. She talks on the cell phone, eats blue ice cream, and the car is her dressing room as she fixes her hair and makeup, and changes into various costumes.

As the mercurial Ellie Parker, Naomi Watts is a real hoot playing her sort of semi-autobiographical self, years before she skyrocketed to fame in David Lynch's MullHolland Drive. Delightfully displaying her comic talents, Watts plays a frustrated actress thrashing around the low end of the Hollywood food chain. Expanded from actor Scott Coffey's short, Ellie Parker features a few days in the life if Ellie as she struggles to define herself in the City of fame and dreams.

We first meet her as she's on her way to audition for a Southern Bell and she's channeling her inner Scarlett for a bored young director named Smash. Of course the audition is just one of a number that morning. Soon after it's completed she jumps into her Honda and drives to the next tryout, singing along to Blondie whilst rehearsing a New Jersey junkie-whore accent.

Ellie's personal life is also rather unstable. She's unsure whether she wants to stay with her hunky loser musician boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino). When she meets cute Chris (Coffey), an appealing but flighty alleged cinematographer after a car accident, she indulges in an intermittent flirtation with him. She's also crying on the shoulder of cynical actress pal Sam (Rebecca Rigg) who's both savvier and less principled than her friend - she makes up childhood traumas for their method-acting class.

The movie was obviously a labor of love the Ms. Watts and what you see here is probably what you get. She's bawdy, irreverent, and sometimes crude, and also terribly insecure about her talent as an actress. The irony is that she is talented - her track record has since proved it - but the movie's point is that she doesn't yet realize it and she ultimately fails to believe in herself. Effectively skewering the Hollywood scene, Ellie Parker is about an industry where everyone is looking for his or her ten minutes of fame and where no one really knows who he or she is, and there's a real sense of biding time for the big role you haven't yet read for.

At ninety minutes the original conceit of the movie tends to where a bit thin and you can feel the original short slowly being stretched to breaking point, but the film remains surprisingly enjoyable. The industry in-jokes are wicked and mordent and Ellie's emotional exhaustion is fully felt as she wonders whether to just throw in the towel and quit acting for good.

Elle Parker ultimately stands as definitive evidence of Watts' formidable comic and dramatic talent and her uncanny ability to transform herself - she reveals a totally unglamorous and vulnerable side that few other A-list actresses would ever allow us to see. At the same time she's imparting insight into the very real struggle of an actor's dedication and "process." In this respect, the film is probably required viewing for just about every other struggling actor in Hollywood. Mike Leonard April 06.

Average customer rating:

Ellie Parker [2006] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
Starring: Chevy Chase , Robbi Chong , Scott Coffey , Billy Ray Cyrus , and Mark Pellegrino
Manufacturer: Strand Home Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

All Comedy | Comedy | Categories | DVD | Video

Comedy | Drama | Categories | DVD | Video

DVD | Format (binding_browse-bin) | Refinements | DVD | Video
ASIN: B000E8QV9M
Release Date: 2006-04-11

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