Hugh and Drew

As long as I took the day off work for my retirement appointment, I visited Sam’s Club, which I fondly refer to as the $200 store, canceled the noxious credit card, and got an identification card only. After finishing my short shopping list in record time, I decided to see what was playing at the theater across the street as I haven’t been going to many movies since last fall.

Music and Lyrics, with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, was starting in a half hour, so I bought a ticket and sat and read until the movie madness began. By the time I watched the 20 minutes of entertaining short features and then struggled through the awful coming attractions trailers, I was ready to get on with the movie, for crying out loud! It’s annoying to be a captive audience for ads and promos that I would normally zap or mute.

I liked the storyline of the movie: cute, warm and cuddly. Hugh Grant looks old, while Drew Barrymore looks young, which always strikes me oddly: cannot the filmmaker see that the pair doesn’t match? That same age mismatch drove me nuts in the Dianne Lane movie, Under the Tuscan Sun, and took away from any enjoyment I may have found in the chick flick.

Anyway, back to the point, there were continuity issues with Music and Lyrics that interfered with my movie viewing pleasure! Huge Grant wears a large silver ring alone, and then paired with another silver ring; first on his middle finger, and then on his ring finger. It shifts back and forth in the same scene, and because the rings are so large, it becomes obvious. It almost looks as if he’s wearing a wedding ring, but wants to hide it with the other, bigger ring, so maybe there’s something going on behind the scenes that made its way into the film.

In the scene in the coffee shop, where Hugh and Drew are talking, Drew picks up her drink to take a sip, the camera shifts to Hugh’s lines, and right back to Drew, who once again has to pick up the drink she was sipping a second ago. Hugh’s muffin is pristine in half of his close-ups, and picked apart in the other half. He picks a piece of it, lifts it to his lips while Drew speaks her lines, and then repeats the same process again when the camera comes back to him for his response. Sip/no sip; bite/no bite/ rings shifting back and forth. It is so distracting to be able to see the obvious camera changes that it made me wonder how low budget the movie actually was.

The final distraction is Drew’s dark moustache. Yeah, in half the film, she looks like she has a heavy 5 o’clock shadow or a very chocolatey milk moustache, which is not attractive. I could not tell if it was caused by the camera angle, a poorly lit set, or a personal hair growth issue! If I had been starring in the movie, I would have insisted on someone going into the film and erasing that dark shadow across my face!

I liked the film for what it is, entertainment on a rare day off, but found the quality of the filmmaking sorely lacking. The music is perky, and the Britney clone who sings the new song Alex writes is spot-on all the way to the skimpy costume she wears at the concert. But at $7.25 a ticket for the Wednesday afternoon matinee, this is one I’d wait to pop my own corn and see on DVD.