for Cinetalk.net
Damien Chazelle’s new musical, La La Land, is out since Friday. Freshly nominated for seven Golden Globes, it’s going straight for the Oscars. This Award season is the continuity of a promising career which started in Competition at the Venice Mostra were its female lead, Emma Stone, won the silver Lion for best actress.
Stone, opposite leading man Ryan Gosling, is an aspiring actress going from one audition to another making ends meet by working in a Hollywood cafe. Gosling, playing a jazz musician, is also trying to make it while playing pop songs at parties. Both will meet…
Chazelle’s passions, film and music, made it almost unavoidable that he would come up with the Hollywood classic rite: the musical comedy-drama. The homage to the tradition is obvious. And it works. It’s well crafted with a good chemistry by the leads. Musical numbers and camera movements offer elaborated sequences, right from the opening with its long shots, that the director masters perfectly.
La la Land, also bears Chazelle’s personal signature (or trademark) in defending (again) Jazz music while incorporating it into a coherent mix that is accessible to the masses. Plus the ending (that we will not display because we hate spoilers) offers a few surprises.
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The story is as thin as it is simple-minded and totally banal. The „relationship“ between Seb and Mia is actually as hollow as the entire plot of the film. She runs away after one bad word from him and never answers the phone thereafter. Just the way grown-ups who are supposedly in love with each other ought to handle such matters. The way they handle their later career conflict is as laughable . I spare you the details in order not to leak the content of the movie.
Another example for the hollowness of the story and the holes in it: The way they get their career up and running. Failure happens only to the very few who didn’t try hard enough in Hollywood, who didn’t want it badly enough. La La Land.
That is the director’s inspiring vision he wants to convey? And I read critic after critic falling by the wayside for how romantic, awesome, inspiring… Oh yeah?!
The movie would likely be a total flop without the two main actors – and without the giant hype and marketing campaign that has obviously been unleashed. The soundtrack is largely uninspiring. The dancing and singing of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling is OK, but far from exceptional or ground-braking. I have no idea how anyone could spot magic or authenticity in this highly superficial, dull movie. The only really authentic about this over-hyped piece is, that it is a true reflection of today’s Hollywood: self-absorbed, totally superficial, full of hypocrisy and unable to even consider any other view than that of their own echo chamber. There are, obviously and luckily, some notable exceptions to this among the myriad Hollywood stars and starlets, but they are far and few between. It says a lot about the Golden Globes that they have been awarded in bulk to this movie. Maybe the competition was even worse?
If this film gets Oscars as many predict, it will simply be fitting. After all, a Hollywood in their castles and mansions being totally detached from reality, from the life of ordinary people in this world, from ground realities, they will likely love what they see here in that rose-coloured mirror. Even though they are just staring at and into their own echo chamber. This movie is Hollywood-narcissism at its worst. Oh, and as a side-note: these are the same people who mock Trump for his narcissism? Go figure!
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