Music and Lyrics (2007)

Nice effects though.

Just perfect...

How sad is this?

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This was such a great movie with self-effacing humor, nostalgia, great likeable characters and really catchy music. As many times as I've seen it, I still tear up at the end.

Music and Lyrics is an entertaining, sweet romantic comedy. Drew Barrymore is a very good actress for this particular role. And I loved Hugh grant playing opposite Barrymore. The romantic chemistry between them is great, starts out as just friends working on music together, but of course their connection turns into a romantic relationship. I also really loved Kristen Johnston in her supporting role. She was actually one of my very favorite parts of the whole film. She is just absolutely hilarious. I loved the comedic lines the script provided her with, and the way she delivered them was done with great timing. That's one thing I love about the script for this movie, it provides it's actors with effective comedic lines. I loved the Buddhist Britney Spears like pop star in the film, she gave a lot of good material for comedy, she wasn't all that funny herself, but like I said, she gave funny material to other characters, how people reacted to what she did was the real comedy. All in all, this rom com is humorous, especially if you were alive and can remember the 1980s. I of course was not, but I still found it funny. It's just that you will probably be able to relate more effectively to everything if you were in the 80s. 7/10

"No pets or children" sounds a guideline for filmmakers, and for screenwriters it should be: "no creative problems or stage careers as a theme". Only a biopic can portray stage scenes and popularity on a level that is believable, just because that is what the audience knows about the subject: yes, this star was popular.The theme of this movie is arguably a love story, but with the title Music and Lyrics, the creative process of writing is at the center of the tale. From the start the love affair of the ex-POP! singer Hugh Grant and the wannabe writer Drew Barrymore follows the road of the romantic comedy, albeit that they need to "write the music and lyrics of their love themselves". There we have the first problem: any depiction of a creative process becomes tiresome, regardless of the many dead pan jokes Hugh Grant gets to make. Watching people try to rhyme or look for a song idea is watching... people try to rhyme or look for a song idea. It is like watching people work.Then we have the performances of the movies superstar Cora, which should be valued somewhere between Britney and Christina: but how on earth do you simulate a big, expensive, explosive pop concert without doing exactly that: staging a big, expensive, explosive concert? Well, you do it slightly cheaper, smaller and, not so explosive. And it shows. Yes, there is a large Buddha from where Cora emerges, but would Britney or Christina put up a whole show with just one large Buddha on stage? Ten different Buddhas maybe, and a pyramid, and a temple and a burning sky scraper. The audience knows what a superstar concert looks like, and is not easily convinced. The actors give it their best shot, and some even succeed, but all in all this is a perfect example for how a screenwriter best avoids depicting fictional popular concerts, and showing the process of creativity. They're implausible and tiresome, and both traits are ill- fated for a commercial movie, which a rom-com, with all its rules and clichés, is.

"Music and Lyrics" finds the usually intolerable Hugh Grant playing a washed up pop singer who meets a young songwriter, played with customary cuteness by actress Drew Barrymore. As per formula, he's cynical about music and the music industry, but her optimism, love and energy rekindles his zest for art and life. They fall in love, break apart, and then get married, the film climaxing with Grant writing a song for Drew and then revealing it to her on stage in front of a crowd of thousands.It's your standard boy meets girl, boy loses girls, boy gets girl back formula. What's different here is that the film has been deliberately reverse engineered, the film-makers starting with a very specific set of problems: how to get a guy and girl romantically writing songs and singing for one another, and how to climax the film with the guy expressing his love to the girl via song in front of a large public audience. As cinema and music, or rather pop-cinema and pop-music, largely define man's understanding of love and romance, the intention here is to tap into a kind of ultra romance, director Marc Lawrence trying to create a more mainstream version of what John Carney did a year earlier with his indie film "Once" (also another Barrymore project, "The Wedding Singer").The film is at its best when its satirising 1980s glamour and pop music. It also pokes fun at the contemporary music scene (many young, oversexed, dumb pop stars gyrating for their rumbustious fans), but such jabs are less funny. As with most of these films, the climax must be a public event, we the audience watching as an audience watches our heroes. This both enfolds us in the drama and taps into a kind of primal need for public validation.Usually with these films the female role is given to a foreigner, someone verbally impaired. It's the male character who masters language and is in a position of linguistic dominance. Here Barrymore is the master of words and Grant's the stammering goof-ball.Note that both actors are all surfaces. They're constantly blasting us with ultra cute, ultra romantic, ultra bashful, ultra suggestive, don't-you-want-to-just-kiss-me-now poses. Every gesture, pose and inflection is relentlessly calculated. Barrymore's an old hand at this now. Grant too. Love is itself a game of broadcasted and exchanged signs.7.9/10 – Romantic comedies, keeping the human species breeding since 1909. Worth one viewing.