Checked out La La Land, the new old timey yet new timey musical starring two very ugly people: Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. There lives are true tragedies with their perfect faces. Sigh.
Anyhow, La La Land is a super charming romance, a very smile-worthy flick that loves and adores art, dancing/soft-shoe, singing, jazz, and old-time Hollywood musicals. What it doesn’t love is modern Hollywood and LA itself (the title La La Land is not exactly a compliment). Which results in a movie that is lovely, romantic, and fun to watch about two lovely, romantic, and charming people who meet and fall in love through music, dance, jazz, and following your dreams set in a town that may not always respect or demand these things.
Ryan Gosling loves old-school jazz and wants to open an old-school jazz club in LA. Emma Stone is a barista who wants to make it big in Hollywood. They meet, they hate each other, they start to warm up to each other, they sing, they dance, and they both support and inadvertently fail to support each other’s dreams.
When I say this movie is a musical, it’s a musical – though a more naturalistic musical, if such a thing can exist. People do break into song at times that makes sense to the story and they aren’t all expert singers or dancers (they are good, but they aren’t the best singers and dancers and that kind of is charming in its own way). The opening sequences tracks across a number of cars in a traffic jam in LA, each car has people singing songs to their own radios… and then they get out of their cars and have a united song and dance number about LA on the road and top of their cars. It’s an unreal moment set in a grimy traffic jam on a freeway on-ramp…. but is it any more unreal than songs in any old time musical?
The movie also loves, loves, loves jazz and, surprise, it’s made by the guy who made the excellent Whiplash. At one point, the movie switches form being a musical and replaces it with jazz tunes… and brings in John Legend to lead a new-style pop jazz band that seems pretty great to me, but the characters – who are lovely, charming, but flawed – may not see it that way. But the movie asks that, if you adore the past (classic jazz), can you survive with just that in the modern world where that kind of jazz is dying? In fact, it asks that (without asking it directly) of Hollywood in general and has a line, “Hollywood worships everything, but values nothing” which seems like a throw-away line but is really a commentary about Hollywood and the film industry, I think.
My point is, the movie is clever in that it name-checks jazz as both an old-school and new-school music form that you, as an audience member, can equally apply to the movie’s apparent love of old-school musicals, romances, and dance films. It doesn’t make that comparison for you, but it presents the alternative through dialog and story. Pretty clever.
Anyhow, this is a pretty great movie… it’s worthy of a joyful smile throughout the first half and a more bittersweet smile through the second. As long as you can just enjoy a good tap-dance number between two very pretty actors and groove along with the tunes in a movie that doesn’t have high stakes, you’ll like it. It’s charming, it’s romantic, it’s funny, and it speaks to our need to strive, to seek, to find and not to to yield. Also, the end sequences is visual jazz played to a jazz soundtrack and speaks volumes of emotions through imagery and tunes.
Score: 88