Salon.com > One Day

Books you can dance to

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:20:00 +0000

For a music-infused movie, the soundtrack to "One Day" is tasteful but limited -- '90s trip-hop, late-era Tears for Fears, college-radio one-hit wonders, a new Elvis Costello song. It's easy enough to imagine Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) two 1988 graduates of the University of Edinburgh with a Del Amitri or James poster on their dorm-room wall.

Actually, it might be too easy. A much better sense of Emma's sensibility -- cool Britannia like Prefab Sprout, Cocteau Twins, Billy Bragg and Everything But the Girl alongside English major mainstays Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell and Joan Armatrading -- appears on author and screenwriter David Nicholls' website. Nicholls has imagined the two mix tapes Emma gives Dexter (one from 1989, the other from 2000) and created Spotify and iTunes playlists where they can be streamed or purchased.

“One Day”: A gimmicky, misbegotten love story

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:19:00 +0000

Most of the time, with failed Hollywood movies, you've got a familiar mix of ingredients, way too many cooks in the kitchen and an utterly predictable result. You end up with a forgettable curiosity like, say, "Friends With Benefits," the Mila Kunis-Justin Timberlake rom-com that came and went earlier this summer. You couldn't call it awful -- it has attractive stars and a screenplay that provides them with some amusing lines and at least the hypothetical potential to add a new twist to an old formula. But like most such products of the entertainment conglomerates, it was essentially constructed by a massive interlocking army of producers and agents and publicists and marketers; any shred of personality the film might once have possessed was systematically ironed out of it in a quest for rib-tickling, inoffensive mediocrity.