REVIEWED - MUSIC AND LYRICS:UNASHAMEDLY served up as date movie bait for St Valentine's Day, Music and Lyrics is a romantic comedy in which flashes of knowing humour help compensate for yet another utterly conventional yarn in which opposites attract.
Hugh Grant lays on some deadpan charm as Alex Fletcher, a faded pop singer working the nostalgia circuit of amusement parks and school reunion parties, trading off his glory days in PoP!, a New Romantics group that scored six number ones in the 1980s.
It's not just the exclamation mark in their name that recalls Wham! The lead singer (Scott Porter) went solo, enjoyed many more hits, forged a movie career and got knighted, while Alex, the Andrew Ridgely of the group, hasn't recorded an album in the six years since his last recording got slated in the music press and ended up in the bargain bins of record stores.
Potential salvation arrives in the unlikely form of teen diva Cora (Haley Bennett), who credits an old PoP! single for helping her cope with the divorce of her parents when she was seven. Alex gets a week to write a new song for Cora's Madison Square Garden concert, but he needs a lyricist and he just happens to find one in his own apartment: Sophie (Drew Barrymore), who is filling in for the woman who arranges and waters Alex's plants.
How Alex can afford to pay someone to do something so basic is never explained. I guess writer-director Marc Lawrence had to concoct some way for them to meet. While they have nothing in common, as is de rigueur for this genre, we know it's only a matter of time before they'll be making sweet music together.
The movie sags frequently as Lawrence stretches this thin material across the best part of two hours, and the screenplay creaks just as often when the characters speak in bland wisecracks as if they were in a TV sitcom. All that's missing is the dubbed laughter.
It helps that Grant gamely throws himself in another of his self-effacing roles, and that he resembles Cliff Richard with his new, less floppy hairstyle. Adam Schlesinger from Fountains of Wayne provides the singing voice to which Grant mimes, and he wrote most of Alex's songs for the picture. Sample lyrics: "Since I met you, my life has changed/ It's not just the furniture that's rearranged."
The best gags are visual, as the movie pokes fun at musical performances from different eras. There's the pomp and phoney Buddhism as the underdressed Cora takes the stage and, funniest of all, the perfect pastiche of a flashy, over-the-top 1980s music video for a vintage PoP! hit, which opens the movie and gets a welcome reprise during the closing credits.
