Drew Really Needs to Grow Up

Rating: 1/10 (24 February 2007)

This makes two stinkers in a row. Granted, it's not as nausea inducing as FEVER PITCH- which I actively hated. But Drew is making movies like this and the not all that great DUPLEX either because she has no judgment about what scripts will play well or because she knows there are enough people who will see a bad movie just because she's in it.
MUSIC AND LYRICS has one of the worst screenplays in the hundred year history of movies. There's no relationship to human speech or human behavior. Characters spew vast chunks of exposition giving us background about characters and events we're really not all that interested in.
The situation is, at best, odd. Drew plays a plant girl- she goes to people's apartments to water their plants, a job which I'm sure can support an adult in comfort in Manhattan- who gets involved with a washed up singer who was a big star...when she was ten years old. Her romance with a man sixteen years older than she is continues Hollywood's endless exploitation of younger woman/older man relationships.
Characters appear and disappear with no logic. The script seems to have been rewritten about twenty times because there's no flow to it. There's a really good performance here that actually gets what few laughs are elicited from the audience. Kristen Johnson plays Drew's older sister with a manic energy and in the few scenes she's in almost brings the movie to life. Although this is billed as a comedy, the fairly large audience we saw it with sat in stony silence most of the time.
The movie this is closest to in spirit is SAW. Instead of guilty people trapped in a torture chamber MUSIC AND LYRICS gives us hugely talented performers speaking dialog that sounds nothing like human speech in situations that strain credibility.
Grow up, Drew. You can't get by on the audience's good will toward you much longer. You have a heart, a mind, and a soul, but you're being reduced to nothing but a mass of unkempt hair and irritating mannerisms.