Search - Various Artists :: America's Sweethearts

As co-penned and produced by Billy Crystal, America's Sweethearts is a good-natured backstage romantic fable with few barbed takes on contemporary Hollywood--if as much substance as a Tinseltown pitch meeting. With that in mind, this collection makes perfect sense, culling together a collection of lightweight contemporary pop so homogenous one wonders if it was pasteurized, to boot. When it's left to laconic fret whiz Mark Knopfler ("Gravy Train") to kick out the album's jams, we're talkin' some serious serenity here. Kelly Levesque's upbeat "Some Hearts" tries to set the tone, but proceedings then largely fall into predictable, paint-by-numbers pop (Clara's Star's "Walk with Me"; Invertigo's "Chances Are"; Anika Moe's "Falling in Love Again" and a predictable remix of the Corr's "All the Love in the World"), leavened by unexpected surprises like ex-Spice Geri Halliwell's sprightly take on the hoary "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps." Veteran James Newton Howard's orchestral score gets its due (and obvious marketing priority) with the album's final cut, a suite of solidly comic romantic cues. --Jerry McCulley