I was in the elevator this morning, going back down to the sandwich shop off the lobby to fetch a carrot-raisin muffin because the line was too long earlier, and this girl who got on at 16 started talking to me. She made full-on, somewhat startling eye contact and at first I thought she thought I was someone else. Then she said, “How are you doing?” I said fine and asked if she’d just come from an audition, because 16 is where the audition studio is. She said her audition was in an hour and I’m unsure why I didn’t ask what it was for.
I imagined for some reason that she played a musical instrument, possibly because she didn’t have on enough makeup to be auditioning for a show. You recognize those girls in the elevator right away. You also recognize those girls from a block away because their facepaint has been applied to be visible from a mezzanine. Instead this girl was cute in an unobvious way, resembling Chloë Sevigny in Boys Don’t Cry, with a fairy-dusting of acne.
She asked if I was there for an audition myself (which was strange because I didn’t get on at the 16th floor) and I told her, no, but that I work on the 17th floor and could usually hear piano playing, loud acting and singing rising from below.
“That must be annoying,” she said wryly.
“Sometimes. But sometimes, at the end of a long day, it can be soothing,” I said, which was a lie but necessitated by my lack of anything more clever to say on short notice.
By then we’d reached the lobby and she said awkwardly, “Well, have a nice day,” and we parted, never to see one another again.
Now, if this had been a romantic comedy, at the point when she asked whether I was there for an audition, I would have started singing Kenny Rogers’ “You Decorated My Life” charmingly badly and she would have laughed and then we’d have gone out for coffee at The City Bakery and I’d start hanging out at her place, writing lyrics for the songs she’d compose on her viola. There’d be at least one scene in Central Park in autumn of us walking and talking. There’d be some misunderstandings but we’d work them out thanks in part to the advice of my wizened-sarcastic coworker-friend from Brooklyn played by Paul Giamatti.
Or maybe I’m digressing like this because I saw Music and Lyrics tonight, which sort of follows the formula of the above paragraph. He, a washed-up pop singer from the ’80s. She, hired to take care of his plants. Ah, but she’s a closet writer. They burn the midnight oil crafting the perfect song together, on a commission from some sort of Christina Aguilera popstar knockoff. They learn about themselves, they learn to love, they learn to rhyme again. Argh. I did enjoy watching them brainstorming for a day straight over the minutiae of perfect words and chords, which reminded me of that clichéd truth of Twain’s that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is ... the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”
Drew Barrymore left me wondering: Can she turn that lisp of hers on and off like some actors can with an accent? Because she sounded more lispy than usual here. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s charming but obviously I have issues. Hugh Grant plays his patented randy/foppish quippy-Brit character albeit with more pelvic gyrations and an appropriately age-beaten face that no doubt still gets some sort of sandalwood scrub applied daily to its T-zone.
Technical issues: wince-worthy lip-synching by Hugh and Drew to their voice doubles when their characters are required to sing, which is often. Most unforgivable is opening the film by depicting the hit music video Hugh’s character made in the ’80s but not treating the picture to make it actually look like it was filmed in the ’80s (i.e. the music videos from different eras shown in This Is Spinal Tap).