Uptown Girls

The spoiled daughter (Brittany Murphy) of a dead rock star has to get work when Daddy’s money runs out, and the only job she can find is as a nanny to a little girl (Dakota Fanning) who’s even more spoiled. In the movie’s tortured logic, the immature adult and the snotty brat somehow will heal each other’s wounds. The story originated with a production-company receptionist and then passed through the green fingers of three other writers—but after five years, it still looks like a receptionist’s idea of a good movie: a contrived, amateurish horror of a tear-jerking comedy. Murphy is clompy and gauche, with her timing always a bit off, like a teenage president of the Lucille Ball Fan Club, and 9-year-old Fanning is simply insufferable. Director Boaz Yakin is helpless against a lousy script and two stars who never click.