"That's entertainment!" - A review of the movie, "La La Land"

(source of image: Wikipedia)

Creating a great musical, is one of the toughest challenges for film makers. If human intellect is like peacock feathers, then musicals are like the longest and most shiny ones at the tip of the damn bird's tail. The ones that make you think, "this creature can never fly". And yet, the musicals that did take into the air, movies like "Singing in the rain", "My fair Lady", "The sounds of music" and "Cabaret", are some of the greatest creations of the film industry. Damien Chazelle's "La La Land", is making it into that list.

It is so hard to make a great musical because the ingredients just don't mix up. You have to take a melodramatic narrative, mix it with singing and dancing and a Technicolor set, and somehow make all this work together without making a fool out of yourself, in spite of the fact that your characters just broke up and each is going in a different direction, devastated and melancholic, but now they have to sing a duet. The way to overcome this challenge is by layering the ingredients in the right order. The Dancing and singing should come first and support the storyline on top of them, instead of trying to ride on top of the story. If this is done correctly, then not only that the musical will work, but it will also be able to have gravitas and a saying.

And "La la land" makes it. It makes it because it manages to be a tribute the classic musicals of the 1940's and at the same time be a 2016 movie, with a message that is relevant for today's audience. The singing and dancing scenes are short, so that they can fit to today's audience short attention span, and also to reference other musical legends without lingering to the replicas too much (You can play allot of "spot the replica" while watching "La La Land", but you will have to be quick). The result is a movie that simply works. The script is brilliant, Emma stone, Ryan Gosling and the rest of the players are wonderful, the dialogues work and the dancing parts manage to support the story and remain creditable even when the the two main characters take off their shoes and put on tap-dance shoes completely out of the blue. "La La land" is classic and original at the same time. It is movie entertainment at its best, a reason to go out to the movie theater in a cold winter night. It will make you laugh and cry and then leave the theater with a smile that will go with you for a while. This is what the movies were invented for. Two hours of escapism... Or maybe not quite so?

The main tribute that "La La land" makes, is to Scorsese's "New York, New York", but the two movies are also quite different. It's a difference that tells the story of the difference between NY of the 1970's to LA of the 2010's, where everybody drive a Toyota Prius and Steve Jobs is a divinity (who even gets a tribute to his "Here's for the dreamers" speech). Besides all the dancing and singing and fun, Damien Chazelle is certainly sending a message in the movie.Maybe not as thought provoking as in "Whiplash", but still worth pondering about. Have we become too scared to dream? to explore? to venture and risk? Chazelle is playing a "what it?" game with us. "What if we would not get addicted to a false sense of security? What could we gain that we have now lost? And how sad it is to discover that you can't turn the wheel back?"

Or maybe I'm just being carried away by my own regrets here... Oh dammit! Go see the movie. It's a great musical, and that's entertainment!