I didn't think I was going to like the most highly touted
movie of the season: La La Land. It
started out with a massive car jam on an LA freeway that turned into a musical
free-for-all, with all these millenials jumping out of their cars and doing a
high- energy romp all over the freeway.
My mind went "Harump" and I thought, "Duh, I've been
duped by the press--just another teen age musical!" I was wrong.
After Mia (Emma Stone) had given Steve (Ryan Gosling) the
finger for honking at her on the freeway and he bumped into her (really bumped)
at the Studio coffee shop where she worked, and after another silly dance
number with her and her roomies (in a very upscale apt), the movie finally
settled down to what it was really about:
two attractive young people with powerful ambitions--his jazz piano,
her’s serious acting--trying to escape being swallowed up in the great yawning
maw of Hollywood, at the same time being clearly personally drawn to each
other.
Once the movie settles comfortably into their respective
stories and how they intertwine, it literally becomes the stuff of which dreams
are made, taking them into one amazing dance sequence that finds them literally
among the stars above the Griffith Observatory--surely my favorite dance
sequence in the whole film. When Stone
and Gosling are together, as Doris Day sang so wondrously in the late 40's,
"It's [truly] magic"! The
story they share (love vs ambition) is totally familiar, but the way they tell
it is so enchanting, you can virtually convince yourself you're hearing it for
the first time.
I've heard comments pro and con about the ending, which I
thought perfect and superbly realized and directed. If you're a Romantic, you may not like it,
but as dreamy as it seems at times, this film is not a fairy tale--it's real
life, at least as it exists in--well, in La La Land.
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