Music and Lyrics

Story of Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore being super-cute. No, seriously, though, Grant is a washed up half-a-pop-duo (think the other guy from Wham) who's trying to get back into the game. Barrymore is his substitute plant waterer who gets recruited to act as lyricist for Grant who has had a song commissioned by Cora Coleman (think... Hillary Duff + an early/middle Spears-ian amount of writhing).

As I'm sure many reviewers have noted, the film just as sugary, innocuous and fun as the music it's about. Worth buying? No. But if you're looking for something in this genre (oh, they fall in love? Did I forget to mention that?) that's: a) less cloying than classic, floppy-haired Grant (c.f. "Notting Hill," "Nine Months"), b) new, and c) cleverer than it has any right to be when dealing with both Grant's characters past and present, then this movie could be the romantic-comedy one-night-stand you've been looking for. But please, don't marry it.

What's interesting to me, though, is that Adam Schelsinger of Fountains of Wayne wrote the music in the film, which is weird, because for a film that's all about the transcendent unity of a writing duo, Schlesinger appears here without his FOW writing partner, Chris Collingwood, and, presumably the song lyrics in the film were written mostly either by the screenwriter or Schlesinger, sort of, you know, undermining that whole "transcendent connection between co-writers" trip. The music itself is solid classic pop, and, really, you can't go wrong asking Schlesinger to co-write that.

Overall: 5/10. Good for what it tries to do.

Little Children

...and now for something completely different, eh?

Little Children is adapted from the novel by Tom Perotta, the same guy who wrote "Election." That means, of course, you can expect it to be filled with the startling insights into people that "Election" had but in a far less cartoon-y manner.

But I've got to say this: what is the fucking deal with the narration? Like, ok, so, when Lucy (Kate Winslet) sees Brad (Patrick Wilson) go, the narrator chimes in with something like: "And Lucy suddenly felt a cold sadness well up within her." But, you know, it's film, and Kate Winslet is a good enough actress that I could see the cold sadness well up within her. Sometimes it introduces information which would've been hard to get through filmic exposition, and that's ok. But a lot of times it's just giving us stuff we could've easily surmised from the, oh, I don't know, moving pictures we're watching.

The other problem with the narration is the choice of narrator. I understand they wanted someone who sounded authoritative, and during one of the football sequences it snapped into focus for me who they got: the NFL films guy. Watch the movie and you'll see what I mean. Which, his narrative ability and the context makes the voice-over a lot less awkward (though no less unnecessary) during that football sequence, it's wholly inappropriate for the kind of delicate revelations that go on throughout the film inside Kate Winslet's head.

Ok, though, as the movie rolls on, the narration fades out, more or less, and the actual film is allowed to take over: and it's splendid. The film itself is splendid. From Kate Winslet's red one-piece, to the now-gaunt Noah Emerich playing tightly what could've been a scenery-chewing part, and the deep, creepy love of Ronnie's mother and the quiet, terrible blank self-hatred and unstoppable self-gratification of Ronnie himself (the sequence that ends his date... goodness).

It's a movie about people who do things they shouldn't do because they find themselves suddenly (or not so suddenly, sometimes) needing to. And they weave together in a way that sheds light on each of them, rather than just complicating them (as so many intersecting-narratives do these days). And, sure, this isn't intersecting narratives in the classic sense, but the b-characters are so well fleshed out and so fundamentally... important, and themselves, and illuminating they deserve more than relegation.

Anyway, 9/10. Excellence.