Charming

Rating: 9/10 (19 February 2007)

M&L is driven by several major sources of energy, if you will, mixed together with skill and a fine sense of timing: absurd comedy, parody, utter predictability and an overwhelming charm that only a romantic-comedy hater could resist. As for me, I was...well 'charmed'. Hugh Grant, as my wife noted, basically always plays the same character: a mix of hapless but amusing bumbler with a self-effacing sense of insight into his own bumbler-ness and maybe human nature in general. In anybody else this endearingness would be annoyingand do not doubt that there are a lot of Hugh-Grant-haters out there; and good for you, because I know where you're coming from. It's just that I'm not with you on this.
Drew Barrymore has always had a slight inherent cluelessness and innocence, mixed it with a twinkle of the actress's own life-ups-and-downs, that made her perfect for this little flick. This is in contrast to another not-so-recent movie Ever After, which was very likable and charming, but I wished the Cinderella character had been someone else, because the US accent just gratedjust as did, for example, the accents in The Three Musketeers and especially Chris O'Donnell's D'Artagnan. I can't abide that kind of sloppiness. But here, Barrymore was perfect.
They spent a lot of time on music numbers in this one, playing songs almost all the way through. This normally would have annoyed me for I would have thought of it as the time-filler it might have been. If it was, well in this instance I don't care, because it worked as well. And the ditty Way Back Into Love is a real earworm. It made the whole thing almost believablebelievable enough at the time to allow, for me at least, effortless suspension of disbelief.
Last, but not least, this is the kind of movie I could never make or script. I don't have the disposition for it. Because of that I really have no notion of how to make it betterand that's a good thing, because I wasn't sitting there, asking myself "but why didn't they...", which is what I sometimes do in flicks that I might have written, but in which I detect serious flaws. If this thing here had flaws, well, I don't care. It was fun and games and lots of laughs. And yes, call me whatever you want to, but I was humming that damn tune when I came out.
Till Noever, owlglass.com