Not everybody loves Drew Barrymore, but I’m quite fond of her. Meanwhile, Hugh Grant has done so many rom-coms he could make asking Alexa for the weather forecast sound like he’s about to pop the question. So why do Barrymore and Grant spend most of “Music and Lyrics” (2007) generating such little chemistry? The story of a washed-up pop star and a frustrated writer haphazardly thrown together to hurriedly dash off a song for a current pop star comes off as, well, haphazard, hurriedly thrown together and dashed off (their age difference doesn’t help). Rom-com conventions rescue the ending – barely.
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Hiding behind owly glasses, Julianne Moore pulls off a perfect Diane Keaton impersonation in “Gloria Bell” (2019). Gloria’s a middle-aged divorcee, living a seemingly full life. Yet there’s an emptiness, as if she’s stuffing life with busyness because there’s no single thing that challenges her. Oh boy, she finds it one night while out disco dancing. Brooding Arnold (John Turturro), who says he, too, is divorced, but suffers from needy millennial daughters. Arnold and Gloria are on and off and on again, as the movie’s momentum goes down the drain, like all those years middle-aged divorcees wish they had back.
Pixar films are generally very good. “Finding Nemo” (2003) is a very, very good Pixar movie about persistence and helicopter parenting. But reviews of Pixar films don’t matter. We watch them because we are kids of a certain age or parents of kids of a certain age and all the other kids (and parents) are watching the movie and we’ll be social outcasts if we don’t watch the movie (and buy the action figures). So let’s instead talk about the underlying morbidity of this Disney flick. About a thousand fish embryos and an expectant mother die before the opening sequence.
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