Image Entertainment
One thing is for sure: I can’t wait for Geoff and Scott to review The Rewrite on the Broken Projector podcast. This upcoming rom-com is about an Oscar-winning screenwriter who is no longer a hotshot and so desperately has to take a job teaching the craft jadedly to college students. The irony is that the screenplay for The Rewrite itself seems awfully bland. The movie comes from Marc Lawrence, who previously wrote such generic non-classics as Miss Congeniality and Forces of Nature and wrote and directed Two Weeks Notice, Music and Lyrics and Did You Hear About the Morgans? The Rewrite is his fourth movie to star Hugh Grant, who plays another unlikable guy who is presumably changed by the love of a woman, a role this time filled by Oscar winner Marisa Tomei.
At the start of the new trailer for the movie, we see a YouTube clip of Grant in his floppy-haired days winning his Oscar for Best Actor – what was that for, again? Nine Months? The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain? Oh, wait, he didn’t win an Oscar. The clip here, employed as a glimpse at the character winning an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, is of Grant winning the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical for Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1995. They’ve even kept some of the speech, though it weirdly still seems like a re-dub and doesn’t match his lips (could just be a bad YouTube connection, I suppose). They also cut in an audience shot that’s clearly from a Golden Globes ceremony rather than an Oscar ceremony, because there are tables.
I know, I’m paying too much attention to something that’s not a big deal. But there’s not much else to latch onto here. Oh, there’s Oscar nominee J.K. Simmons with his Juno wife Allison Janney. That’s interesting. Oh, and there’s a guy obsessed with Star Wars who has the potential to be more annoying than Jar-Jar Binks. I used to really like Grant, as did many of you, I’m sure. That clip reminds us of better times for the actor (forget the tabloid stuff, and that hair). He did some interesting things in Cloud Atlas, alongside his fellow 1995 Golden Globe Best Actor winner Tom Hanks, but the movie itself didn’t really work out.
Of course, there is an audience for stuff like this. Music and Lyrics and Two Weeks Notice were a lot more successful than you think. The Rewrite, which has already earned a $1.8m overseas, will probably do well enough when it opens in the US on February 13th, just in time for Valentine’s Day and those couples who aren’t interested in Fifty Shades of Grey. Critics, on the other hand, will be having a field day with the “The Rewrite needed a rewrite” jokes.
Watch the trailer followed by the real YouTube clip of Grant winning the Golden Globe below.