Creativity and popularity

Rating: 5/10 (25 August 2012)

"No pets or children" sounds a guideline for filmmakers, and for screenwriters it should be: "no creative problems or stage careers as a theme". Only a biopic can portray stage scenes and popularity on a level that is believable, just because that is what the audience knows about the subject: yes, this star was popular.
The theme of this movie is arguably a love story, but with the title Music and Lyrics, the creative process of writing is at the center of the tale. From the start the love affair of the ex-POP! singer Hugh Grant and the wannabe writer Drew Barrymore follows the road of the romantic comedy, albeit that they need to "write the music and lyrics of their love themselves". There we have the first problem: any depiction of a creative process becomes tiresome, regardless of the many dead pan jokes Hugh Grant gets to make. Watching people try to rhyme or look for a song idea is watching... people try to rhyme or look for a song idea. It is like watching people work.
Then we have the performances of the movies superstar Cora, which should be valued somewhere between Britney and Christina: but how on earth do you simulate a big, expensive, explosive pop concert without doing exactly that: staging a big, expensive, explosive concert? Well, you do it slightly cheaper, smaller and, not so explosive. And it shows. Yes, there is a large Buddha from where Cora emerges, but would Britney or Christina put up a whole show with just one large Buddha on stage? Ten different Buddhas maybe, and a pyramid, and a temple and a burning sky scraper. The audience knows what a superstar concert looks like, and is not easily convinced.
The actors give it their best shot, and some even succeed, but all in all this is a perfect example for how a screenwriter best avoids depicting fictional popular concerts, and showing the process of creativity. They're implausible and tiresome, and both traits are ill- fated for a commercial movie, which a rom-com, with all its rules and clichÃ©s, is.