So how do we talk about Brittany Murphy now?

In the final years of her too-short life (which ended with cardiac arrest late Sunday) Murphy was all saucer eyes and nervous energy, a toothy grin on the arm of one shady movie industry boyfriend after another. After multiple called-off engagements, she settled on Simon Monjack, the screenwriter husband and accused con man now raising eyebrows for trying to block her autopsy. Celebrity publications charted her weight fluctuations, speculated about eating disorders and drug use, and documented red carpet disasters and plastic surgery slip-ups.

There was a time, though, when Brittany Murphy's headlines were all about her promise—and until the bitter end, she fought to get back into the lead actress fold that had once seemed a given. After conquering regional acting circuits, Murphy and her mother threw themselves at the feet of Burbank's pilot season free-for-all, and the little girl from Edison, New Jersey scored one role after another, from the short-lived Drexel's Class to Blossom to Melrose Place and her breakout role in Clueless, where Murphy proved herself a talented comedian. The nervous energy was charming; the saucer eyes sweetly endearing.

But it took four years for her to deliver a successful cinematic follow up with small roles in darkly comedic Drop Dead Gorgeous and critical darling Girl, Interrupted, where Murphy demonstrated dramatic range playing an eating disordered incest victim.

One part of that character became prophetic: Shortly after Girl, Interrupted Brittany underwent a transformation from roly-poly brunette to a whippet-thin leading lady with the requisite blonde hair, heart-throb boyfriend (Just Married co-star Ashton Kutcher), and rumors about drug use and eating disorders. She steamrolled through a series of moderately successful (if generally forgettable) comedies, including Uptown Girls, in which Roger Ebert pinpointed Murphy's "divine ineptitude" (in the manner of "Lucille Ball") as the otherwise light movie's strongest suit.

It was a fine career, but it didn't sit right, and Murphy again changed tracks with roles in 8 Mile and Sin City—and a Maxim-approved "troublemaker" makeover—but her agent suddenly dropped her at what should have been a career turning point. Murphy was described as "hot and cold" and "difficult." She became a voicing staple (with leading vocal roles in Fox's King of the Hill and penguin movie Happy Feet) even as she fought for screen time in acting roles she eventually lost due to "creative differences" and being "problematic on set."

So how are Brittany's sometime detractors memorializing her now?

The Guardian's obit opens with potential unrealized:

It has become something of a Hollywood formality that any young woman actor fresh on the scene is pencilled in to play Janis Joplin sooner or later. Brittany Murphy, who has died aged 32 from cardiac arrest, was one of many performers over the years who were attached to some Joplin biopic or another.

In this case, it was Piece of My Heart, for which Murphy auditioned successfully in 1999, but which was never made.

E's Joal Ryan remembers a "rare," "erratic" career defined by what it was not: easy.

She was different. ... Different can mean "extremely difficult," as in the Murphy of a 2008 New York Post item. (According to the paper, Murphy required a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich-diagonally cut, no crusts-on the hour, every hour on the set of the just-released, if barely, thriller Across the Hall.)

Or it can mean "erratic" (per a 2004 MSNBC report on Murphy's behavior at a press junket for Uptown Girls), and "barely there" (per The Wrap on Murphy's behavior during the recently completed shoot for another thriller, Something Wicked.) ...

Or it can mean unique. As in uniquely talented.

CNN takes the euphemistic route:

Brittany Murphy, the bubbly, free-spirited actress who appeared in such films as Clueless and 8 Mile, died Sunday, apparently of natural causes...

The Atlantic's Alyssa Rosenberg remembers Clueless as a bittersweet high point:

The girls of my generation may have grown beyond their fleeting desire for knee-highs, and overalls are nowhere to be found in my wardrobe. But in a sense, Murphy never grew beyond her performance as Tai. To watch her in Clueless is to see her at her most joyful and at her funniest. ... Onscreen or off, she never quite surpassed the role that launched her career: the endearing and genuine newcomer...

But Brittany's most memorable postmortems will likely be of the tabloid variety: grisly details from the scene of her death, "sources" who come forward to say they saw it coming, speculation about "self-destruction," "enablers," and the price of fame. And so Brittany Murphy, it seems, will die as she lived: ambivalently, a public figure that no one ever quite figured out how to pin down.

Actually, even closer was the vote for Best Animated Film, which wound up going to HAPPY FEET on what amounts to a technical foul. Miller's penguin-fest beat out A SCANNER DARKLY by a mere two points, but no sooner had this result been announced than Andrew Sarris, who has taken a bathroom break a few minutes earlier, revealed that (1) he had neglected to submit his ballot for this round of voting, and (2) he would have cast his top vote for the Linklater, giving it the victory. [...]

Sarris confirmed that he was giving A SCANNER DARKLY three points. When asked what his second choice was, he answered FLUSHED AWAY, which wasn't in the running...Owen Gleiberman complained that he felt Sarris was casting a vote for the sole purpose of altering the winner. Others made noises of assent, and Fine changed his ruling (with Sarris' blessing), saying the original point totals would stand and HAPPY FEET would receive the prize.

Whether or not their default decision to celebrate the vaudevillian talents of flightless sea birds over a rotoscoped mindfuck will have any bearing on how the Academy chooses to recognize either movie remains to be seen, though it can certainly be no comfort to Richard Linklater knowing that his project would have been named the New York critics' best animated film if not for a poorly timed piss break, leaving him to curse the urine-decelerating effects of an octogenarian critic's enlarged prostate for his misfortune.

• What Really Went On Inside the NYFCC [The Screengrab]

1. Happy Feet—$42.320 million
Happy Feet has received such positive attention for integrating a message of environmental preservation into its family-friendly story of a tap-dancing penguin that the movie's producers are already honing in on the social issue to be spotlighted in the inevitable sequel. They're in talks to obtain the rights to controversial penguin tale And Tango Makes Three, hoping to build the fledgling franchise's next installment, Happy Feet II: Mumble Has Two Daddies, around the issue of gay adoption.

2. Casino Royale—$40.6 million
[Spoiler alert, proceed at your own peril! We mean it.] Maybe Sony and the Broccolis knew what they were doing when they recast debonair Pierce Brosnan with the beefier, rougher Daniel Craig. One can't help but feel that if Brosnan were stripped naked, lashed to a chair with no bottom, and threatened with having his genitals repeatedly smashed with a knotted rope, he not only would have given up whatever information his interrogators desired, but additionally offered naked photos of the Queen and the launch codes for Great Britain's entire nuclear arsenal.

3. Borat—$14.350 million
By the end of the day, we suspect that even Borat's fictional documentary producer, Azamet Bagatov, will have filed a lawsuit claiming that the producers tricked him into trying to suffocate Sacha Baron Cohen with his buttocks and testicles, causing irreparable harm to his reputation.

4. The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause—$8.218 million
5. Flushed Away—$6.812 million
We are no longer interested in discussing Tim Allen in a fat suit or computer-animated rodents exploring the enchanted place where humans dispose of their feces.

12. Let's Go to Prison—$2.108 million
Universal's takeaway from this disappointing opening: Next time, they'll get those pee-activated urinal cakes installed a couple of weeks earlier and in thousands more locations, making sure that no one who uses a public bathroom can claim that they haven't heard of their movie.

• November 17-19, 2006 Studio Estimates [Box Office Mojo]