You know when you get that "getting old" feeling — it's when the film stars you once used to love and revere in sizzling love stories and action-packed melodramas of the late 20th century now appear in stories about aging parents, layoffs, sickness, bankruptcy, foreclosures and other stuff in life that's rapidly encroaching on one's own reality.
This is why I hope Hugh Grant will be around forever and ever, dispensing snide upperclass English witticisms whether he still has some Grant-brand charm left or not. In "The Rewrite," that charm is all but depleted — Grant is a shadow of his former self, but the power to spoof his own has-been handsomeness soars to peak levels.
You get the feeling he's actually glad to be out of the rut of walking into a room and being the best-looking man there, of having to woo women on and off the screen and have them dissolve in a puddle of adoring goo at his feet and all that. As Gerard Depardieu once told me, "Age is a glorious liberator. At last, I don't have to do love scenes any more."