01. Way funnier than I expected it to be. Much of this has to do with the fact that the movie could alternately be titled 1001 One Liners for Hugh Grant, but ridiculously witty and dry one liners as delivered by Grant can make nearly any movie enjoyable. I suspect writing with him in mind must be fun.
02. The best line, though, actually came from Drew Barrymore’s character. They’ve been commissioned to write a song for the latest and greatest teen pop tart sensation and this singer, Cora, has obviously been famous long enough that she’s now into her eastern mysticism phase, so naturally her music follows suit and sounds like it was recorded in Rishikesh with the Beatles in 1968. Anyway. Drew Barrymore’s character is completely appalled by this turn of events, thinking Cora has ruined the lovely little song they’ve written, and calls it “an orgasm set to the Gandhi soundtrack.” LKJAS:LKJDAKLJSD OMG. Because she’s not nearly as funny as Hugh Grant in this movie, you’re sort of taken aback when she says it and we laughed for five minutes straight, I swear to god, because it came so completely out of left field.
03. You know, I don’t think I like Drew Barrymore as an actress very much. She’s tolerable, I suppose, but she’s not great and her acting can border on painful sometimes. [I liked her okay in Ever After, though.] I think somehow she manages to embody everything I hate about the way female leads are written in comedies [usually rom-coms]: they’re supposed to be quirky, except “quirky” usually means “incredibly klutzy head case who talks to much without actually saying anything” and that bothers me a lot, since you never see similar male characters. I liked her wardrobe, though.
04. As a brief tangent, there are people at the IMDB forums arguing about whether or not she is arrogant and someone posted this little gem:
She is four days older than me and speaking as someone who is the same sign and born within the same planetary alignment I will tell you this. She is insecure, and she is humble. There is a strive to be a good person, but there is a mad bitch streak that must be tamed at all times because sometimes it rear’s it’s ugly head
ASKLJAS:DLJ PLANETARY ALIGNMENT.
05. The opening and closing credits were done as an awful 1980s music video (“You haven’t seen that since 1983″ [/Jim Halpert]), which was kind of awesome. They showed a bit of it in the trailer for this movie and it’s what made me want to see this; I’m glad Hugh Grant doesn’t take himself too seriously (not that I previously thought he did). They did a “Pop-Up Video”-esque thing for the closing credits to give us all the epilogue information, it was cute.