I don’t know how we ended up going to see this. Our local cinema thought it would be clever to take out Blood Diamond (which I was dying to see) and replace it with Music and Lyrics. The title itself portends the great catastrophe that is this film starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore.
The title is straightforward, to be honest, because essentially that is what this film pretends to be about. In a nutshell, the story revolves around a has-been '80s pop star (actually the lesser half of an '80s pop duo called Pop — I’m revelling in how cleverly named the band is) Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant), and his plant lady Sophie Fisher (the lady who waters his plants), who has the hitherto undiscovered ability to write these poetic lyrics.
Alex Fletcher is trying to save his already washed up career - comprised of singing at high school reunions and amusement park openings - by writing a song for the new spiritual pop sensation Cora (an icon to 'tween girls) who looks high most of the time (I’m not sure if the “wheat grass” reference was a pun on something else). Fletcher has a few days to write lyrics for Cora and of course he discovers his plant lady Drew Barrymore’s “amazing” writing skills.
Clearly the story wouldn’t be complete if Sophie Fisher didn’t come with any baggage. Following an awkward dodging shot because she thought she saw someone she knew (turns out to be a photograph in the window of the bookstore) she reveals that she is Sally Michaels, the antagonist of famous novelist Sloane Cates' book about a talentless creative writing student who seduces him to use his publishing contacts — lame! And hence the story continues predictably with vacuous dialog, ridiculously bad acting, a succession of bad jokes, and worst of all stretching each one to fill up the 96-minute run time.
Cora the spiritual teeny bopper is portrayed as a Buddhist/Hindu, and she is also a scantily-clad skank who at one point during the film emerges from a giant Buddha statue and performs a sensual dance routine with 25 other scantily-clad backup dancers and several other male ones who were made to look like Buddhist monks all spilling over her gyrating body. Honestly — what the hell? I am a Buddhist, and not a religious one at that, but I don’t like the notion of a half-dressed woman who looks like she’s on crack emerging from a statue I and many other Buddhists around the world worship.
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