Song Sung Blue – 8

Music can make you happy, and this film did, over and over. Good songs, sung with joy to enthusiastic audiences, were played to the end but smartly intercut with snippets of the characters’ daily lives, so they never outstayed their welcome. The characters were all people you rooted for (cf. Marty Supreme) and enjoyed being with, even the teenage girls. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson were wonderful, as was the supporting cast, featuring good old Michael Imperioli. The plot may have been based on a true story, but it doled out excessive tragedies in a Hollywood-hokey way that erased any thought of authenticity. But that music!