Formulaic if grotesque comedy about the bonding of two Poor Little Rich Girls of staggered ages, the senior of whom is reduced by circumstances to work as the junior's nanny. To be sure, any film starring Brittany Murphy is going to have a degree of grotesquerie -- outsized lips, teeth, eyes, jumping out from the face almost to a point of free-floating detachment, as in some Surrealist painting. And nine-year-old Dakota Fanning is about as natural as a laugh track. In both characterizations, there's a certifiable attempt at oddity: the erotomania of the older girl over a "rock-and-roll poet sex god" (she herself is the daughter of a dead rock-and-roller), and her pet pig, Moo (as in Moo-Shu Pork), who was scheduled to be her supper one night in Bangkok; and then the neat-freakery and sanitation-insanity of the younger, and (much as one hates to brand this an oddity) her taste for Mozart and ballet. The sincerity of that attempt is belied by the pat ending of rampant reconciliation and enlightenment. More exactly, the boogying ballerina. With Jesse Spencer, Heather Locklear; directed by Boaz Yakin. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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