Review of Hearts Beat Loud (2018) by Mmadnessgames — 28 Feb 2019

When the husband and daughter team are singing together, the movie works; when they're not singing, it mostly doesn't...

I like sweet movies. So does my wife. We both like Offerman. And, we have a baby daughter who will (God willing) grow up to jam with us... So, we should have liked this movie.

Less than halfway through, my wife said she wasn't feeling it. Neither was I, so I turned it off and attempted to watch The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (only to turn that off too).

Quixote is better than Hearts Beat Loud, but neither of are very satisfying.

Hearts is too slow. There's very little laugh out loud comedy. There's little to no effective drama. (I don't care that his shop is closing down. I don't care about his mother.).

There is no real conflict between the two main characters, except that the daughter is leaving for college. (I don't care about the dad being sad that his daughter is growing up.).

The only thing the film has going for it is sweetness and the sweetness only really works when they're making music together... and it only works because the music they make is good. If this was the exact same film and the music wasn't good, it wouldn't have anything going for it.

This is fiction. They aren't spontaneously creating great music as a father/daughter team. The music wasn't created spontaneously. It was composed by a film composer. So, the illusion (however sweet) is meaningless.

This is two actors pretending to be related to each other and pretending to co-create music that they had no part in creating. The sweetness is fake. I'd rather just listen to the music without the pretence.