Hugh Grant, Drew Barrymore and the song

On Saturday I watched the movie “Music and Lyrics” with Hugh Grant (no I did not watch it with Hugh Grant, but my sis and aunt). I am a little Hugh Grant fan. Not crazy, but I like the role he is playing in most of his movies. “Music and Lyrics” came into the German theatres about a year ago and there was quite some fuss about it. But somehow I never saw it till now.
By the way the German name of the movie is: “Mitten ins Herz – Ein Song für dich”. It means translated something like: “it hits right into the heart” or “it touches the score of my heart” – “a song for you”. Kind of reminds of “You’ve got mail” that’s called in German “Email for you”. This whole title changing and translating business is confusing. I never get why they change a English title into another English title for the german audience.
I am a strong advocate to NOT translating English movies into German! So much of the language gets lost in the process and we forget to value the really good German productions. A plus would be that people would learn a bit of English while they are relaxing. Our Dutch neighbours don’t translate movies and they survive. Why shouldn’t we?

But let’s go back to the movie at hand. I was a bit disappointed by the shallowness of the plot. I did not expect too much from a romantic comedy, but the plot was so very obvious and clumsy. The music was ok, I give that. But given that this movie was about lyrics, they were not impressing. That Hugh and Drew will get together is not very hard to figure out from the cover. But here the plot: By accident two very different people end up on the project of writing a song. After three days of hard work, the two manage to excite the most famous singer and she takes the song. That seemed a bit easy. They end up in bad, or rather under his piano, after some side stories. Drew´s problem with the so far unknown business world of the music industry and Hugh’s over eagerness to please the singer create a distance between them. At the big concert where the new song is going to be presented Hugh sings a song that he made for Drew, asking her to give their romance another chance. She gets backstage and they fall into each other arms.
Ok, that is a really rough overview of the plot. There surely was potential for more depth, but the characters seem to be rather plain. It all goes too fast and you don’t have the feeling you are getting to know the characters. Maybe I have lately seen too many non-Hollywood movies.
Ok, so why should you want to watch the movie if you haven’t yet (and why I would see it again). Besides Hugh Grant, it is simply hilarious. Not really the story or even the characters, but there are so many cool and funny lines! I have only seen it in German but it must be even better in English. If you need funny quotes you get them from this movie!