Sunday, September 25, 2011

Fun time-waster to stream or rent: the Cox & Steinberg MISS NOBODY with Leslie Bibb

Are you cowed by simply dealing at all with Netflix streaming? Really: The amount of titles available are enough to cross your eyes. You start searching through the various categories and there are so many movies that sound at least at little enticing that, before you know it, your "Instant Play" queue is up to a couple of hundred titles. You quickly realize that you're not going to live long enough to watch all of them. So, instead of making your decision to watch one of them right there on the spot, you keep browsing and add a few more "interesting" looking films to your queue. Gheesh.

All of which brings us to today's "cover" -- MISS NOBODY, a 2010 Canadian film about climbing the corporate ladder in an unexpected manner, written by Doug Steinberg and directed by Tim Cox. We watched this one simply because we were growing crazed by all the options, and so decided to make an immediate decision. It wasn't a bad one. As fun, time-wasters go, the film is bright, well-cast and funny and charming enough to make up for its rather tired and a little old-fashioned plot, in which a pretty young woman named Sarah Jane (Leslie Bibb, above, and below, left) is passed over and over for any job promotion, until...

This lovely lass, who ordinarily would not hurt a fly, discovers she has a talent for aiding and abetting accidental deaths, and one by one various impediments to success find themselves... gone. Probably the most important bit of information that makes all of this quite acceptable in a rom-com killing tale is that Sarah Jane works for -- wait for it -- a sleazy pharmaceutical company whose other employees are, trust me, no loss to the planet when they leave it.

These include her "hottie" boss Brandon Routh, the snidely efficient Vivica A. Fox (above), a supremely officious and funny Patrick Fischler (below) and various other oddly assorted victims. The relatively inventive ways in which these folk meet their maker are fun (if not particularly original), and the romance that develops between Sarah Jane and a local cop (Adam Goldberg, center, two photos above) who rents a room in the home of her and her mom (Kathy Baker, asleep, at right, two photos above) is handled with some fun and flair, as is the relationship with her sort-of BFF Charmaine, played by Missy Pyle (shown at bottom).

No great shakes (but certainly good shakes), the movie rolls along nicely with its technical credits -- from the widescreen photography to sound, sets and lighting -- proficient and professional. In all, a painless way to spend 90 minutes.  And Miss Bibb, as the semi-clueless killer, is quite adorable.

Miss Nobody debuts via DVD this Tuesday, Sept. 27, from Inception Media Group, and will be available for sale, rental or, as I mentioned earlier, you can try streaming it.

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