Music and Lyrics

Marc Lawrence wrote and directed it. Alex Fletcher is a former member of PoP!, a British band of the 1980s modelled on Wham! and Duran Duran. The opening is the band’s old video for PoP! Goes My Heart. Alex now plays fairgrounds, until the young pop star Cora Corman, played by Haley Bennett, asks him for a duet and gives him 48 hours. He can write music but not words, and the lyrics come from Sophie, who comes to water the plants in his flat. Three of the songs, among them Way Back into Love, were written and produced by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, who had earlier been nominated for an Academy Award for the title song of That Thing You Do! Hugh Grant’s vocal coach was Martin Fry of the band ABC. The ending nods to VH1’s Pop-Up Video. It opened at number one in the United Kingdom and Ireland on 9 February 2007, and came fourth in the United States on 14 February behind Ghost Rider, Bridge to Terabithia and Norbit. It took 145.9 million dollars worldwide on a 40 million dollar budget. A good fit if you want to watch a song get written in a room, scene by scene. Not for anyone after an uncertain outcome: the shape is set from the start.