It makes sense in context that they’d sing an OK song in their charmingly OK voices, breathy and a little breathless.
Within the movie, those limitations fit their characters, and fit the genial mood, and underscore that these kids, however charming, haven’t exactly figured it out yet. (That’s a tough curve, but if you’re seeking the pantheon, them’s the breaks.) Stone and Gosling’s first big number, the single-take pre-lover’s quarrel “A Lovely Night,” pops and fizzes onscreen, with a graceful, casual ease that slowly accumulates into something resembling a showstopper.
It’s A-minus filmmaking propping up B-minus songs at best. The only issue is that camera pyrotechnics don’t do you much good on Spotify. La La Land is an effervescent and bracingly bittersweet movie, done a disservice by the weight and towering height of all the statues accruing around it. When things start getting super-manic halfway through, your primary thought now, absent any factual basis, is still likely to be “COCAINE.” (When Joseph Gordon-Levitt built his Saturday Night Live monologue around the song in 2012, the effect was similarly terrifying.) It is unfashionable, in this day and age, to try nearly this hard to make ’em do anything.Įven at its flashiest, La La Land never attempts anything this physically demanding: The camera doles out all the pyrotechnics, whether it’s the dizzying swimming-pool flourish that briefly elevates the vapid party anthem “Someone in the Crowd,” or the moment in “Planetarium” when Stone and Gosling glance at each other and surge heavenward. The Singin’ in the Rain song that really drives home how dramatically the movie-musical landscape has changed is “Make ’Em Laugh.” Donald O’Connor’s tour de force knocked ’em dead in 1952, but in the cynical 21st century, it scans as totally exhausting. There’s no comparison, and nobody on any side of this debate thinks otherwise. Leave Debbie beaming on that ladder, and Gene floating several inches off the ground. Times are tough, so if we can pick only one, La La Land picks the right one. We’d much rather watch great actors sing passably than great singers act passably. It’s the difference between Dancing With the Stars and an era when the dancers actually were the stars.
La la land songbook full#
Wow, they’re not terrible at this, you’re made to think, full of not so much wonder as relief. They’re amateurs as singers and dancers both, sloppy and sweet. As young, struggling artistes, Gosling and Stone are no Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds by design.
These things don’t translate, and aren’t supposed to. But to even evoke, say, Singin’ in the Rain in this argument is a little facile, whatever your intention.
La la land songbook movie#
If you’re the guy who made La La Land, you bring that scene up as a preemptive attempt to place your movie in that hallowed All-Time Movie Musicals pantheon if you’re among the leagues of pissy internet people who hate La La Land - or just really love Moonlight, this season’s other big Oscar contender - you wield that same hallowed canon as a cudgel against it. The specific question before us today: Is it a great one? Does it boast an original song even half as rousing and yearning as A Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran,” which is gently ridiculed in an early scene meant to establish Emma Stone’s adorkable populism and Ryan Gosling’s tiresome snootiness? Can director Damien Chazelle hope to unseat South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut as the finest movie musical of our generation? ( It’s true!) The answer to those last two questions is a definitive “no.” The answer to the first is a sheepish “probably.” Let’s run some numbers and feel some feelings. It is also, as you have probably heard, a musical. It is time to deal with La La Land, the Golden Globes–hogging cultural phenomenon, the likely Oscar lock, and the target of a thus-fearsome backlash. An opening flourish for the ages.Īnyway, that’s Deadpool. It leaves you electrified, spiritually renewed. The glittery whole casts everything in a new light - the old stuff especially. The colors pop, the fresh faces beam, the soaring melody bears you heavenward.
The year 2016’s prettiest, perkiest bit of cinematic awards-show bait begins on the freeway, rendering the mundane fantastical, conjuring balletic elegance and sly humor from the drudgery of everyday routine.
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