Ellie Parker

Of Hollywood’s big-league young actresses, Naomi Watts stands out from a bland pack. She’s clearly game for a challenge, whether it’s remaking Michael Haneke’s ‘Funny Games’ (her next project) or filming ‘Mulholland Dr.’ with David Lynch. It’s the unglamorous, seedy Hollywood milieu of Lynch’s film that she revisits in this low-budget, handheld digital affair written, directed and shot on a pittance by Scott Coffey, a fellow actor who was also one of her co-stars in ‘Mulholland Dr.’.

Watts plays Ellie Parker, an enthusiastic but struggling LA wannabe actress who drives from one dodgy film audition to the next, trying her best to clamber up the greasy pole of Tinseltown but never getting very far. This largely improvised, diary-like and energetic film is strangely interesting, despite its navel-gazing subject, and Watts is fun to watch in a role she obviously relishes. A sketch of a movie, ‘Ellie Parker’ is an endearing rather than coruscating take on the underbelly of Hollywood, but amusing all the same.