Music and Lyrics

Despite its title, not all was in harmony in this movie. In particular, there was no sense of romantic chemistry between the characters played by Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, so the crossover from feuding-sibling-type friends to lovers would’ve been really hard to believe if it wasn’t coming from a mile away.

Even just the idea of Hugh Grant as an ageing pop star is quite funny, but to see him in the whole 80's get-up singing and dancing is quite hilarious. His character is not quite as comical, hedonistic, old and unique as Bill Nighy in Love Actually, but still very good. However, Drew Barrymore’s eccentric hypochondriacal character with hidden depth just didn’t work for me. She may as well have been on auto-pilot with a character derived from a dozen previous movies.

Towards the end they try to tear away from the shallow simple plotline and bring some depth to the movie, which only turned it from mildly amusing to clichéd and contrived. The whole grand-gesture-stadium-declaration thing was a ho-hum expected climax, with Drew Barrymore wearing the exact same expression as in Never Been Kissed (now that's a painful movie).

There’s a light poke at the music industry and the rising young divas whose main talents are gyrating and panting into the microphone, but it clearly was not meant to offend the industry or make any real statement.

To expect anything more than close to two brainless hours of standard romantic comedy would be like trying to extract meaning from A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’ – you know it’ll never be a meaningful ballad so you have to just enjoy it for what it is. Oh, and it's definitely a DVD movie - forget paying more than ten bucks for it!