Through the power of Netflix for XBox, I am able to instantly stream movies I would have probably otherwise never seen as well as those that I just shouldn’t see. Among those that shouldn’t be seen is one of Brittany Murphy’s last films, The Ramen Girl. Now I know this movie came out in 2008, but for those considering giving it a view when browsing through the newest Instant Watch titles, you might want to rethink that decision. Brittany Murphy left a slew of subpar movies in her wake but this one is on a different level of bad.

In The Ramen Girl Brittany plays a stubborn, bratty, American Girl who finds herself alone in Tokyo after the boyfriend she flew there for leaves her. She notices a ramen house across the street from her apartment and I guess thinks “Hmm, I’m sure the man running the shop will take in a complete stranger, who knows zero Japanese, as his student. I’m going to force him to teach me how to be a ramen chef!” and she begins her path of “self discovery”. Chef Maezumi, which she calls her sensei, reluctantly gives her a job there doing grunt work until she is ready to learn the ways of ramen. Being the bratty stereotypical American girl that she is, she constantly whines that he hasn’t taught her anything about cooking yet. She should have at least tried learning the Japanese language and get in touch with their culture before whining about becoming a master ramen chef, but she doesn’t bother learning anything aside from basic words during the entire year that she spends in Japan. To try to pass her character off as someone who obtained a law degree is laughable.

For a movie called The Ramen Girl, there sure was a lack of ramen. Most of her interaction with ramen is either eating it or staring at it, then out of nowhere she had made her own dish. Nowhere in this movie do we see her actually cook. Yet Maezumi believes that her ramen will beat that of a the son of a rival ramen chef. He stupidly declares that he will stop cooking ramen altogether if she doesn’t win in a taste test and *spolier alert!* she loses. Her ramen is deemed less superior by the Grand Master of Ramen (I shit you not) but Maezumi makes her his successor anyway. He does drink a lot so that might describe his completely backwards decisions of hiring her and then risking his business over her only to watch her lose.

Continued spoilers.. With all of her new found noodly knowledge she moves back to New York and starts her own ramen house called The Ramen Girl. OMFG! They used the title of the movie as the title of her shop! I get it now! Did I mentioned she fell in love with a half Japanese, half Korean guy while in Japan only to have that guy leave her like her other boyfriend did? Well that happened and he then somehow hunted her down in New York to be with her because apparently he found her personality so awesome that he had to quit his job in Shanghai to be with her. The End.

I give this move one noodle out of five noodles.