"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Thursday, February 2, 2017

La La Land (2016, PG-13)

I really would’ve liked La La Land to be a knockout for me.  I know it is for many people, and it’s probably the odds-on favorite come Oscar night, but I just don’t see it, which is a bummer.  While it has a lot of moving parts that I ought to like, I don’t feel they come together in execution.  Of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen so far, this is my least favorite.

Mia and Sebastian are two young people trying to make a name for themselves with their art in Los Angeles.  Mia is an aspiring actress aching to just get a callback, while Sebastian is a jazz pianist with very firm ideas about what music should and shouldn’t be.  A series of coincidences brings the two together, and over the course of an LA year, they’re pulled together and tugged apart as they wrestle with how to reconcile their dreams with reality.  Oh yeah, and it’s a movie musical of the ole Fred ‘n’ Ginger variety.

I’ll start with the parts I like.  Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are both very engaging as Sebastian and Mia.  I like both of them a lot in general, and they work well together.  The moments that Sebastian and Mia pop off the screen for me, such as when Mia jokingly lip-syncs to Sebastian during a performance he’d rather not think about, are down to the strength of their acting and chemistry.  The production design is really nice; I enjoy the very deliberate color palette on display in the costumes, the blocking, and the sumptuous city-porn shots.  Also, this could just be my untrained eye, but I feel they do a pretty decent job presenting choreography that masks the dance inexperience of their stars.  The dancing is relatively clear and uncomplicated, but I think it looks fairly good onscreen and mostly keeps my interest.

Most of the rest, though?  I wouldn’t call it bad, but none of it really screams “Oscar frontrunner” to me.  The story is fine but nothing special, feeling a bit light to me (light as in lightweight, not just lighthearted, which I don’t think should necessarily preclude films from getting Oscar love.)  Neither Gosling nor Stone is an especially strong singer – I’d give a bit of an edge to Stone, but I’d still pretty much just say “fine” – which isn’t entirely unexpected for a movie musical but is disappointing all the same.  Watching the film, as much as I enjoyed their acting, I couldn’t help but wonder how, say, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anna Kendrick might have been in the roles.  More damning for me, however, is that fact that I just wasn’t impressed with the songs.  I already talked about this (and my desperate Moana Best Original Song hopes) in my reaction to the nominations, but I feel like I need to say this again.  Coming out of the theater, the only song whose melody even remotely stuck with me was the one that got repeated numerous times throughout the film (“City of Stars,”) and I thought only one made any sort of emotional connection with the characters or the stories (“Audition.”)  I was actually reminded of “The Silent Partner,” which I reviewed on a recent Buster Monday.  What that story did for silent comedy, I kind of think La La Land does for movie musicals.  Even though it’s billed as both a throwback and an original musical, it feels to me like someone’s idea of what a movie musical is like rather than what they really are.  The songs, for the most part, don’t serve the story in any meaningful way, but the film doesn’t boast enough true triple-threat star power to make thrown-in-for-the-fun-of-it song-and-dance numbers worth it.

Oh, and I have very strong feelings about this movie being up for Best Sound Mixing.  The instrumentals overpower the vocals in nearly every song, to the point where I often couldn’t understand the lyrics (which made it that much harder to get invested in the musical numbers.)  For a movie musical, I would’ve thought a top-quality audio mix would be a major priority.

Warnings

Language and some drinking.

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