We're less than a week away from the annual Oscars award show and La La Land is poised to nab many awards, presumably the highlight of the night, 'Best Picture.' The film has tied Titanic for the title of most nominated film in Oscar's 89-year history, with 14 nominations. Quite impressive numbers, but I wasn't quite impressed with the film.
Watching the much talked about traffic jam/flash mob-style musical opening number, I was doubtful of this film immediately. It didn't seem like West Side Story but more like that terrible Coke commercial I see every time in the multiplex theater before the trailers start. I was worried. No, I don't want your passed-around, bird flu-infected popcorn and soda.
Director Damien Chazelle's film is an ode to old Hollywood Technicolor musicals of the mid-20th century (An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain, to name a few) with a dash of '60s French Jacques Demy musicals like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in all of its candy-colored glory.
And that was one of the main problems I had with LaLa Land. Its "odes" and "valentines" were a bit too homage-y, too assemblage-y to hold any emotional weight for me or be wowed by its lack of originality. The big, lushly backdropped dance sequences between the two lovers Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (in the Griffith Park Observatory, for example) were quite beautiful and technically well shot but they were gem moments adrift in a lackluster romance.
The film lack's the bite and grit of his previous feature Whiplash (about a teenage drumming prodigy) that could have made this film even richer. My main disappointment with LaLa Land was that it didn't push the extremes of each situation enough. The hum-drum lives of Gosling and Stone as they pursue their dreams, didn't seem tough and dreary enough to make the fantasy sequences of breaking into song pop. The stakes didn't seem high enough.
She works as a barista but owns a brand-new Prius (huh?) and he works some nights playing piano in a middle-brow restaurant but has his own large apartment in L.A.? It seems nitpicky but I wanted their "suffering" to have a bit more reality to make their dreams and romance a bit more epic. In a movie about movies, it should have been elevated.
I kept thinking of two possible directorial choices that could have upped the epic feel of this Oscar-contender.
What if all of the non-musical moments were shot in black and white (or at least very sun-bleached, desaturated color)? Wouldn't that make the grand peaks of the Gosling/Stone song and dance sequences shine even more? That Wizard of Oz trick of escaping the humdrum would have made their fanciful wishes really sing. Instead we get a CW network meet-cute that we could have seen on TV.
And the moderate, but not memorable, singing and dancing of the two leads? What if Chazelle would have upped the idea of these two wanna-be stars in L.A. trying to "make it" by actually casting two unknown, up-and-comers in the roles? Two whiz-bang singers and dancers that would run circles around Gosling/Stone and beat them at their own game, instead of "falling for" two established, big-name stars.
Wouldn't it be more effective, more exciting to root for these John and Jane Does who haven't made it yet actually "make it"? Watching winners win isn't very exciting. Where's the fire inside?
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