SnoopyStyle Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes) is a lonely girl from small town Vermont working at the glove counter in L.A. Saks and heavily in student debt. She meets flighty artistic Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman) at the laundromat. Ray Porter (Steve Martin) is a rich older gentleman. He buys a pair of gloves from Mirabelle and gifts them to her. They begin a relationship but they don't necessarily see their fling the same way. Lisa Cramer (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras) is the gold-digging perfume girl.It's a pretty little movie. Danes is such a lovely girl. The visual look is neatly beautiful. If there is any deficiency, the guys are not worthy of Danes. Schwartzman is playing his man-child character. Martin is too old and too distant. As a romance, it's hard to root for either of them to end up with Danes. In fact, I would rather that she walks off into the sunset on her own.

Steve Pulaski Shopgirl is memorable for the sole purpose of showcasing Steve Martin's incredible ability to create simple setups with sly wit and capable performances. Based on his novella of the same name, Shopgirl certainly has a premise with substantial ideas sure to bring light a wide range of material, monologues, and emotions, yet the problems that plague the film ultimately stunt the film's ability to succeed.The story revolves around Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes), a woman working at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills soliciting gloves that could probably only be afforded by the one percent of America, hoping to pay off her mountain of debt. In comes two men who will play a very important role in her life, one of them a socially inept self-employed artist she meets at a laundromat named Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman). The other is a successful, wealthy logician named Ray (Steve Martin).Both of these men bring very different benefits to Mirabelle, and both of them ultimately lack the same quality. Jeremy is the poster-child of quirky hipsters, aimlessly wandering in the uncertain circle of life, providing Mirabelle with biting, eccentric charm, while Ray has enough wealth to shower her with gifts, but fails to commit to anything more than a flirt taken to the next level. What both these men lack is the ability to give Mirabelle authentic love, and are both shallow when it comes to the idea of commitment and the skill of adapting to life's erratic ways.In terms of character development, the film provides some, yet what personally soured it were the character's personalities which were remarkably unremarkable. Ray is a decidedly bland, rich archetype, Jeremy is a rather annoying soul, and the audience isn't too preoccupied with Mirabelle's scenario, which turns from solidly constructed to bitterly formulaic by the latter-half.There's also a problem with many of the dialog scenes which I must go into once more. It seems more and more today, the most recent examples being Terri and The Myth of the American Sleepover, respectively, when characters talk to each other, there is a long, abrupt, unnatural pause between their conversations. It throws off the continuity and the realism of the conversation if prior to a character's response there's a two to three second pause. It's not real, it's not cute, it's cloying and artificial.To examine Shopgirl as a romantic comedy is a foolish and invalid move; it's a drama, with relationships in the foreground. It lacks the romance, the feel, and the formula of one of the genre-pieces; a notable feat, for sure. Its solid performances are aplenty, its strangely greenish-tint adds a nice texture to the cinematography, and the whole film can be summed up with the phrase "offbeat." Unfortunately, there's not enough in the way of tolerable characterization, emotional leverage, and true charisma to warrant a recommendation.Starring: Claire Danes, Steve Martin, and Jason Schwartzman. Directed by: Anand Tucker.

butcherofasilkbutton A sublimely tedious film! sit back and p*ss away two hours of your life staring deep into Steve Martin's Navel. The last and worst of the noughties movies about randy middle-aged men getting off with young cute young girls(American Beauty, Lost in Translation). But whereas the former can occasionally ascend to the state of bittersweet farce and the latter eventually becomes a meditation on the dislocations and absurdities of its backdrop setting, this movie never takes a step outside the small island nation of Steve Martin's ego. All this would make the film boring. But what makes it really gut wrenchingly awful is the directors crow-barred insertion of really loud and melodramatic music. I think the director thought she was Jean-Luc Godard. Please, please don't waste your time with this film!

grendel-924-520542 Not a bad movie overall. I especially like Clair Danes's character.What irked me is to see, yet again, a flawed, foolish character wearing a cross on a chain around her neck. The Jews who controlled what we saw evidently wanted everyone to know that the nitwit was a Christian and not a Jew.The nitwit was the 'Lisa Kramer' character, played by Bridgette Wilson.If she had been shown with a Star of David around her neck, the screams would have been prodigious, but I am almost certain that I am the only person who has pointed out how insulting that little bit was.And this movie is just one example of an almost universal habit of making sure that unpleasant characters are shown to be from Christian backgrounds.What a pathetic society we have become, to allow such insults to pass by without so much as a peep of complaint.