babatjie

I wanted to like this. I liked the movie. This has appealing characters, decent acting, and a lot of heart. I'm fine with updating it with black characters, queer characters. Although the segregation of the time makes it hard for the characters to interact, and the plot feels disjointed.

But OMG that anachronistic dialogue we tolerated in Mrs. Maisel is 10 x worse in this show. Not a moment goes by when someone is not saying "I'm into it" or "totally" or "super excited" or "like" (in the Valley Girl sense) or "I've got your back." This is not the nitpick of someone who spots a magazine on the coffee table in a scene and posts "actually they didn't start publication till the following year." This is so pervasive that it's super distracting. Did they only hire writers under 30? Do they not know how ridiculously out of place the slang is, or do they think it is necessary to make the story more accessible to younger audiences?

And the music? If they needed to augment the period music, I'd be fine with current and not too well known music being used to create mood or atmosphere . But why use iconic 60s rock n roll? Janis Joplin? Nina Simone? Joan Jett? I got why the director of A Knight's Tale used Queen and Bowie. He pointed out that almost no one in the audience knew what medieval music sounded like (they were used to all historical dramas having Baroque music even if it was several centuries off). So he chose something fun that conjured up what the people in the movie were feeling. That worked. This doesn't. It's just jarring and ill conceived.

All this is why a watchable comic drama that was worth a 7 is getting only a 5.

When I say this movie is inept and forgettable, it is not because I'm just too intellectual to appreciate a light romantic comedy, but because this one isn't good. This is not Notting Hill, or Thirteen Going on 30; it is not even 50 First Dates. It has some good bits, and then it fizzles. Even my 7th grader, who is a big fan of the chick-flick genre, thought it ran out of steam after the first 40 minutes.

I laughed out loud at the beginning: The flashbacks to the '80s boy band videos, Hugh Grant as the genial has-been rocker who is content to make his living from self-parody, Haley Bennett as the pop-tart diva with pretensions to spirituality, are all pretty funny. Gotta love the bit when he finds out the battle-of-the-'80s-bands TV show he's doing requires him actually to go a couple rounds in the ring with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Debbie Gibson, not just play music and vie for applause. And Drew Barrymore looks really pretty. Now I'm out of nice things to say about this movie.

Drew's loopy character wavers between appealing and irritating, and she and Grant don't have that much chemistry. The predictable bits of sitcom shtick that pass for a plot (with sitcom veterans Brad Garrett and Kristen Johnson competently performing the roles of Grant's manager and Barrymore's sister) cannot sustain interest in the question of how the two leads, once they hit a snag, are going to find their way back to being together.

And while the main song, the one the principals are writing together, has a nice hummable hook, the rest of the music is unconvincing. The idea of Madison Square Garden filled with sixth graders, all psyched for teen queen Haley's concert, who sit quietly beaming and swaying in time while old fart Hugh sings an Elton-John-having-a-bad-day ballad for Barrymore, instead of booing him off the stage, is too implausible for words.

If I hadn't gone to the theater, but had just had it on TV in the background while folding laundry, maybe I wouldn't have found it so annoying.

Seems as though, with such a good cast, they couldn't go too far wrong. Fun to see Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards and Brittany Murphy come together as teenage rivals at 17, 28 and 22, respectively. Ellen Barkin and Allison Janney have their moments. But you might expect a lot more than this mildly black comedy. Put it another way: You might think "Spinal Tap meets Heathers ... that could work," but it's as though the filmmakers followed the Christopher Guest formula and then watered it down so that there would be nothing too subtle, nothing too original, and nothing that could go over the head of an average 11-year-old (the prime audience for the teen movie genre). This isn't Best in Show, or Saved, but it's diverting enough to have on in the background while doing homework.

This is an educational television feature, a "Cable in the Classroom" program designed to introduce Bernstein's music to students by presenting it in terms of his love affair with New York City. It is a pleasant pastiche of performances set in various settings around the city, interspersed with stills and film from original performances, and commentary by critics, colleagues and performers who remember Bernstein fondly. It places the man, and the music, in context, and for some of us, may be the first time we have heard songs from "On the Town" or "West Side Story" rendered without the fanfare and contrivance of the Hollywood productions we grew up with. I happen to like Mandy Patinkin; in any case, he is but one of half a dozen featured singers, and there is nothing unseemly about his performance.