And I said, "I'm not even sure I liked it" and then added a little while later, "I'll bet I could name 100 musicals I liked better."
I did the next best thing. I did an advanced search of the Internet Movie Database against my own ratings for musicals. La La Land ranks 140th on my list.
My own musical Mt. Rushmore:
See La La Land, sure, but don't pull another The Artist and think it's the best musical ever just because you've never seen a musical.
I think classic movie fans generally see this movie for what it is: a pleasant, easy-on-the-eyes flick with a nice score. Well done, but not meant to be a monster awards winner.
ReplyDeleteThat may very well be the essence of my problem with it -- after it cleaned up at the Golden Globe and has (so far) scored an 8.8 rating on IMDB, I thought, boy, this must something really special. And what it turned out to be is roughly Woody Allen's Cafe Society with some song and dance.
ReplyDeleteAlso, as a technical quibble, I had the impression looking at the way the shots were framed that the director photographed it in a classic 4:3 ratio then cropped it top and bottom to turn it into a widescreen film. From the get-go, I kept thinking "if I were to look at a still from this dancing on the cars sequence, I'd think the cinematographer didn't know what he was doing."
I had that reaction over and over again.
Still, Ryan Gosling and especially Emma Stone are such appealing performers, you can't help but root for them.
First of all, it takes the movie more than one hour (81 minutes to be exact) to get to the main point, what most (good) scripts (under Hollywood norms) get done within twenty minutes. What a waste of time!
ReplyDeleteThat's a really good point. That was the one thing that worried me going in -- a running time of over two hours, which is a lot for a musical in the classic Hollywood style. More typical of the bloat that crept into 1960s era musicals -- the era that killed the musical.