YMMV / Music and Lyrics

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Alex Only in It for the Money or it he just desperate and jaded after his career petered out?
• Awesome Music: While all of the fictional pop songs have their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks, they still sound enough like real songs to be enjoyed as such, and most of them are just as catchy as any "real" pop song. Special mention goes to the Duran Duran-esque "Pop! Goes My Heart" and, of course, "Way Back Into Love," the the best adult contemporary song that isn't a "real" song.
• Hilarious in Hindsight
  • Today, Cora comes off as a loose parody of Lady Gaga... except that this movie came out exactly one year before her debut album!
  • Cora turns Sophie and Alex's romantic ballad into a "steamy and sticky" sex jam, which Sophie considers a complete contradiction to the song's emotionally vulnerable lyrics. Six years later was "Wrecking Ball," a vulnerable breakup song who's accompanying video shows its singer strutting about in her underwear and suggestively licking a sledgehammer.
• Retroactive Recognition: Khan the tone-deaf doorman is Aasif Mandvi.
• Strawman Has a Point: Unfortunately, Alex is completely right when he tells Sophie point blank that the music business doesn't care how good you are so long as you sell units and fill seats.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The film captures the '80s nostalgia of the late 2000s/early 2010s at it's earliest stage, thanks to the children of the 1980s beginning to reach adulthood themselves and their love of 80s kitsch influencing contemporary media. It also passively mentions several bands who'd been big in the 80s going on reunion tours, most of whom have either been back together for a while or didn't have very long reunions.
  • The alien dolls that Alex buys for Rhonda's children are from the then-popular Mars 2112, a sci-fi themed Chuck E. Cheese-esque restaurant in Times Square, which closed in 2012.
  • The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue is done in the style of VH1's "Pop Up Video," which have since gone out of style.
  • Alex also regularly visits a record store (remember those?) to check on a long-unsold CD (remember those?) of his unsuccessful solo album. Today, most of the few copies it sold would be found collecting dust in various thrift shops. The store featured is visibly a Tower Records, which had closed all its locations by the time the movie was released.
• The Woobie: Sophie. Before the events of the film, she was in love with Sloan, her English professor, before he had an affair with her while engaged to someone else (without Sophie's knowledge) and when it went sour, he used her image in a bestseller that become a personal nightmare for her, and robbed her of her self-confidence. When they come face to face, Alex has to do the talking for her. The worst part? Alex, in his frustration in Sophie refusing to put together a final verse for the song because she feels she can't, says that Sloan was right in what he said about her. Ouch. He made up for it with his apology in the form of "Don't Write Me Off".

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