Music and Lyrics -- yeah, the movie

I recently saw the film Music and Lyrics, starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. Sara and I wanted something without teeth, after Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth.

The movie, which is bad of course and we did not expect otherwise, is an interesting case study of why conflict is necessary for a good film. One of my in-laws, who has children, complained that Finding Nemo was awful because it was far to intense -- every scene is some major conflict. She wanted to know why there had to be so much. Maybe there could have been less, or at least a pause, but given that all screenwriting books emphasize the need for conflict you can understand why movie-makers err on the side of terror. Go the other direction, and you end up with something like Music and Lyrics.

Hugh Grant plays a has-been 80s pop star -- basically the other guy in WHAM -- who is hired to write a song for a new pop star, basically Britany {edit -- this was spelled wrong the first time I posted}; he needs someone to write lyrics and finds Drew Barrymore, the girl watering his plants. They fall in love.

The main problem with the film is that Hugh Grant is such a great guy: he is kind, tries to make his old fans happy, has accepted that he will never be a superstar, plays Dance Dance Revolution with Barrymore's niece and nephew. He has NO problems as a result of his previous stardom. The whole movie I kept expecting the barrier to his relationship with Barrymore -- this is a romantic comedy after all -- will be that he wants to date women half his age, or was afraid of commitment, or cheats. But the film does not introduce its main conflict until well into the third act -- it turns out at the end that his character arc is that he needs to learn to be ambitious, he needs to stop accepting his has-been status. The romance is secondary -- she cannot accept him until he tries to be more than a has-been. The problem is that his has-been status is not a problem for him -- show him humiliated on a show where he has to box Dustin Diamond (he turns down the chance to be on a show like that actually), something. Otherwise you spend the whole film watching two nice looking people meeting, writing a popular song together, having sex, falling in love and then retroactively learn there was a conflict in the film moments before it was solved. This would be like a murder mystery that just showed people getting along for the first hour and a half and then suddenly they find a dead body and figure out who killed him moments later.

Or as a friend of mine put it about Good Will Hunting: "I am not paying money to watch the story of a boyishly good looking super-genius and his supportive girlfriend and teacher."