La La Land (2016)

La La Land 

Director : Damien chazelle

Writer: Damien chazelle

Stars : Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone,Rosemarie Dewitt

 Read Imdb review Here 

Movie rating ★★★★★

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone shine in a sun-drenched musical masterpiece

The director of Whiplash delivers a musical romance that rushes from first love to heartache via showtunes, love songs and free jazz. Propelled by charming performances from its leads, it’s a sweet-natured drama that’s full of bounce

The seasons of a love affair are played out beguilingly in this wonderfully sweet, sad, smart new movie from Damien Chazelle – the director of Whiplash – and the Venice film festival could not have wished for a bigger sugar rush to start the proceedings. It’s an unapologetically romantic homage to classic movie musicals, splashing its poster-paint energy and dream-chasing optimism on the screen. With no little audacity, La La Land seeks its own place somewhere on a continuum between Singin’ in the Rain and Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, with a hint of Alan Parker’s Fame for the opening sequence, in which a bunch of young kids with big dreams, symbolically stuck in a traffic jam on the freeway leading to Los Angeles, get out of their cars and stage a big dance number.

To be honest, this is where an audience might find its tolerance for this picture’s unironic bounce tested, coming as it does right at the top of the show. It takes a little while to get acclimatised, and for the first five minutes, the showtune feel to the musical score might make you feel you’re watching a Broadway adaptation. But very soon I was utterly absorbed by this movie’s simple storytelling verve and the terrific lead performances from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone who are both excellent – particularly Stone, who has never been better, her huge doe eyes radiating wit and intelligence when they’re not filling with tears. Gosling, for his part, has a nice line in sardonic dismissal to conceal how hurt he is or how in love he is

The two of them get a meet cute in the traffic jam. Stone is Mia, a wannabe movie star like pretty much everyone else, and while waiting, she is distractedly going through her pages for an audition she has later in the day. Chazelle, incidentally, creates a mischievous reveal in which we are later struck by the dull listless way she runs the lines to herself, and the passionate way she sells them later to the producer. I wonder if the director was influenced by Naomi Watts’s actress in that other La-La-Land extravaganza: Mulholland Drive, by David Lynch.

But she doesn’t notice the cars ahead starting, and holds up the driver behind her: a disagreeable guy in a macho convertible, who pulls belligerently round to overtake, scowling at Mia and receiving the finger in return. This is Seb, played by Gosling, a pianist and jazz evangelist who is living a scuzzy apartment in the city.

A little like Mr Fletcher, the terrifying jazz teacher played by JK Simmons in Chazelle’s Whiplash, Seb is a purist and an uncompromiser, a difficult guy to get to know or like. He is lonely and unhappy, claiming to his exasperated sister (Rosemarie DeWitt) that he is just playing rope-a-dope with life and fate, waiting for them to wear themselves out beating him, after which he will come storming back. Seb is fired from a restaurant, where the manager (a cameo for Simmons) is enraged by his tendency to favour brilliant free-jazz improvisations instead of the tinkling background music he gets paid for. But it is here, again, that Seb meets Mia, and then again at a party, where Seb has humiliatingly got a gig playing synth in an 80s-style band. It is fate.

Winter turns to spring and then to summer, and their affair begins to take off: Mia encourages Seb to find a way to open the jazz club he dreams of, but to prove to her he’s not a flake, he takes a regular gig playing the piano in a jazz-rock band led by an old frenemy of his. Suppressing his fears that he is selling out, Seb in his turn encourages Mia to write her one-woman show – that toe curling staple of the needy actress. But there is trouble in store: having been careless in what they wished for, Mia and Seb find that success and careers are to come between them. There is a brilliant scene in which a surprise supper Seb has cooked for Mia descends into a painful row as they quarrel about how their lives are panning out.

Chazelle creates musical numbers for the pair of them, and Gosling and Stone carry these off with delicacy and charm, despite or because of the fact that they are not real singers. The director must surely have considered the possibility of casting, say, Anna Kendrick in the role of Mia, who would undoubtedly have given the musical aspect some real punch. But Stone fits the part beautifully: something in the hesitancy and even frailty of her singing voice is just right. Both actors are also very accomplished dancers within a shrewdly limited range.

La La Land is such a happy, sweet-natured movie – something to give you a vitamin-D boost of sunshine

Read Full Review at The Guardian

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Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone Aswirl in Tra La La Land

It starts with a traffic jam, a sweltering ribbon of frustration on a Los Angeles freeway. All of a sudden, a melody emerges from the squalling of horns and the cacophony of competing radio stations, the commuters leap from their cars, and a big, brazenly sincere movie-musical song-and-dance number is underway.

An early verse, sung by a chipper young woman in a yellow dress, is a kind of overture, hinting at the theme of the bittersweet fairy tale to follow. She recalls leaving her hometown boyfriend behind to pursue fame and fortune here in La La Land, a quaint old nickname for Los Angeles that is also the name of Damien Chazelle’s charming new movie

The ingénue in the yellow dress will vanish from the story, which is concerned with the entwined romantic and creative doings of an actress named Mia (who is behind the wheel of a Prius) and a jazz pianist named Sebastian (who is pushing a shiny crimson beater). The kicky opening sequence serves as an audition piece, a mini-“Chorus Line” acquainting us with the crowd from which these two gorgeous faces will emerge. Mia’s face belongs to Emma Stone, Sebastian’s to Ryan Gosling, so you know what I’m talking about.

But even though they’re played by movie stars, Mia and Seb (as he’s sometimes called) have a long way to go. They are still swimming in a teeming pool of strivers and seekers. Every car from Glendale to Santa Monica holds an aspiring artist or performer of some kind or other. If they shared their rides, the commute might be easier and the smog less heavy, but of course part of the point is that each one makes the trip alone.

That first song, one of a bouquet of compositions written for the movie by Justin Hurwitz, with lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, is called “Another Day of Sun,” and it is the movie’s way of auditioning for the audience, testing our tolerance for a bold blend of nostalgia and novelty. Can a generation raised on “Glee” and the “High School Musical” franchise and besotted by newfangled stage musicals like “Book of Mormon” and “Hamilton” find room in its heart for a movie that unabashedly evokes “The Young Girls of Rochefort” and “An American in Paris”?

Why not? Mr. Chazelle, whose previous features (“Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench” and “Whiplash”) were full of music and brash, youthful energy, is a natural showman and a canny craftsman. He wears his influences on his sleeve, but he wears them lightly. For all its echoes and allusions, “La La Land” is too lively and too earnest for mere pastiche. It doesn’t so much look back longingly at past masters like Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Donen and Jacques Demy (to name a few) as tap into their mojo, insisting on their modernity and its own classicism in the same gesture.

Mia and Seb are throwbacks — if not quite to Ginger and Fred then surely to Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney or Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly — but they are also citizens of the present. They are better at acting than the other stuff, able to express emotion in nonmusical scenes with candor and conviction, but a little stiff-limbed and wobbly-voiced when the moment arrives for hoofing and chirping. In this, they’re pretty much the opposite of those earlier performers, who were vaudevillian troupers before they were thespians.

Seb’s fussy jazzman antiquarianism is, in any case, an entirely plausible millennial affectation. His vintage car has a cassette deck in the dashboard, and he lives in a shabby apartment amid stacks of vinyl records and old concert posters. His prized possession is a piano stool that supposedly once belonged to Hoagy Carmichael, and he’s upset when his unsentimental sister (the great, all-too-briefly seen Rosemarie DeWitt) sits on it.

In his approach to work, Seb is a proud purist, perpetually oppressed and affronted by the prospect of compromise. To pay the rent, he is obliged to take what he regards as demeaning gigs: tickling out Christmas carols and show tunes at a restaurant (the manager is J. K. Simmons, the fearsome Oscar-winner from “Whiplash”); doing ’80s pop hits with a knowingly cheesy cover band; touring with a combo fronted by an old friend who has made it big.

That friend, Keith, is played by the real-life R&B star John Legend, whose affable participation presents an interesting challenge to Seb’s dogmatic traditionalism. It seems doubtful that Mr. Legend would have shown up to perform music that he thought was bad, and Keith’s unapologetic commercialism is less a strawman for Seb’s high-mindedness than a plausible counterargument. The difference between selling out and breaking through is not always clear, and “La La Land” is not so hypocritical as to pretend otherwise.

This is especially true in Mia’s case. She works as a barista at a coffee shop on the Warner Bros.’ lot, dashing off to audition for small roles in dubious films and television shows. But, of course, the line between art and junk is also blurry, partly because to qualify for the junk you must be absolutely dedicated to your art. Which Mia is, in a way that magnifies Ms. Stone’s extraordinary discipline, poise and naturalness

The real tension in “La La Land” is between ambition and love, and perhaps the most up-to-date thing about it is the way it explores that ancient conflict. A cynical but not inaccurate way to put this would be to describe it as a careerist movie about careerism. But that would be to slight Mr. Chazelle’s real and uncomfortable insight, which is that the drive for professional success is, for young people at the present time, both more realistic and more romantic than the pursuit of boy-meets-girl happily-ever-after. Love is contingent. Art is commitment.

As moviegoers, we might prefer not to choose, and in this case we don’t really have to. “La La Land” succeeds both as a fizzy fantasy and a hard-headed fable, a romantic comedy and a showbiz melodrama, a work of sublime artifice and touching authenticity. The artifice lies in the gorgeous colors, the suave camera movements and the elegant wide-screen compositions. In the songs and choreography too, of course, though it has to be said that, with one or two exceptions, these are more competent than dazzling. You’re more likely to remember what you saw than what you heard.

The naturalness comes from the stars, and from the filmmaker’s disarming infatuation with the place apotheosized in song as the “City of Stars.” Taking his place in a long tradition of besotted Easterners, Mr. Chazelle (from New Jersey by way of Harvard) can’t stop looking up at the palm trees silhouetted against the evening sky. The four chapters that track the changing seasons are a sly joke about the weather, which is always perfect. The magic hour — that purple-and-orange twilight cherished by generations of cineastes — seems to last for weeks on end. The Griffith Observatory might as well be heaven itself.

Like a capable bandleader or stage illusionist, Mr. Chazelle knows how to structure a set, to slacken the pace at times in order to build toward a big finish. He memorably pushed “Whiplash” to a complex and thrilling musical climax, and he outdoes himself in the last 20 minutes of “La La Land,” and outdoes just about every other director of his generation, wrapping intense and delicate emotions in sheer, intoxicating cinematic bliss.

The final sequence — one last audition, followed by a swirl of rapturous, heart-tugging music and ballet — effectively cashes the check the rest of the movie has written. On first viewing, for the first 90 minutes or so, you may find your delight shadowed by skepticism. Where is this going? Can this guy pull it off? Are these kids going to make it? Should we care? By the end, those questions vanish under a spell of enchantment

Read full Review at New york times

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Movie Rating ★★★★★

La La Land is an all-singing, all-dancing Oscars frontrunner

La La Land is a film about time travel, but there’s not a flux capacitor in sight. It’s set in present-day Los Angeles, but it’s about that city’s silvery past – which means Old Hollywood, and the dreams that place spun around the soul of any young hopeful with a pretty face, a sense of empathy or rhythm, and a yearning for the spotlight.

At the film’s core are two of them. Mia (Emma Stone) is an aspiring actress behind a coffee shop till on the Warner Bros studio lot. Seb (Ryan Gosling) is a jazz pianist with half-formed but whole-hearted designs on a club of his own. Each has the talent to make a go of their dream. All they need is an opportunity. What they find is each other.

If that sounds like the kind of premise that was last in fashion in the 1960s – chapeau, Jacques Demy – rest assured writer-director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) has built a period-appropriate movie around it. La La Land is a musical in the golden age style – and vehemently so from its very first scene, in which a queue of cars on a motorway flyover becomes the stage for a casually gob-smacking single-take opening number, with bored motorists leaping out of their vehicles and turning a traffic jam into a Fame-style, cartwheeling spectacle.

This is where Mia and Seb meet – the first cut comes when she spots him in her rear-view mirror – but neither one realises or remembers it. The encounter that stays with them comes a little later in a piano bar where Seb’s fired by his exacting manager (a talismanic cameo from JK Simmons, who played the band leader in Whiplash) for straying from the previously agreed set-list.

Stone and Gosling are two of the most naturally sweet stars working today, but together they’re like Diet Coke and Mentos – their chemistry actually feels chemical, or perhaps part of a new branch of particle physics that conducts invisible emotional lightning straight from their faces to your heart

Chazelle and his cinematographer Linus Sandgren (American Hustle) give their leads the kind of close-ups you want to dive into. Stone shines while Gosling smoulders – that’s the deal – and as their romance traverses a calendar year, from a baking hot winter to a prophetically named fall, the shifting state of their relationship plays on their faces as clearly as the seasons on a landscape.

The papery slightness of the plot simply isn’t an issue. (Mia chases after creative satisfaction with a one-woman stage show while Seb pursues commercial success, each with mixed results.) What matters is the feelings driving both of them onward – that fuel magic-hour tap dances, spotlit laments, and at one point, a waltz through the stars that takes off from LA’s Griffith Observatory shortly after the pair see it on a cinema screen at a repertory screening of Rebel Without a Cause

It's categorically not pastiche – the film is sharply sincere about the sacrifices ambition demands, and its more directly dramatic passages hit home without a musical note. But whenever words don't seem enough, that’s where the songs come in – and as life gets better, it takes on the texture of a movie.

Candlelit and neon-bathed rooms alike look they’re caught in flickering projector beams, while the string of a slowly swaying Foucault pendulum in the observatory scene becomes indistinguishable from a vertical scratch on a film print. In the astonishing final sequence – every bit as exhilarating as Whiplash’s drumroll climax, and openly invoking such classic MGM musicals as Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris – the film skips and taps out of reality completely, with the world itself becoming a kind of perfectly decorated film set through which our two lovers tumble and stumble ecstatically, as if they can’t believe life could be so picture-perfect.

Meanwhile, the movie and music industries around them seem determined to miss the point, even as the faces of Ingrid Bergman, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe beam down at them benevolently from posters and faded murals. At a party, a screenwriter jabbers at Mia about his latest work-in-progress: “a reimagining of Goldilocks and the Three Bears from the perspective of the bears…it could be a franchise.”

That’s the kind of line that should prod at both the hearts and guilt complexes of Academy voters, and is just one of many reasons Chazelle’s film has now screeched into pole position for next February’s Best Picture Oscar. But the joke’s a sincere one. La La Land wants to remind us how beautiful the half-forgotten dreams of the old days can be – the ones made up of nothing more than faces, music, romance and movement. It has its head in the stars, and for a little over two wonderstruck hours, it lifts you up there too.

Read full review at The telegraph

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Movie Rating ★★★★☆

A good old fashioned Hollywood musical

Damien Chazelle gives us a generous dose of nostalgia in La La Land

In a seemingly unachievable feat, La La Land manages to be both, real and unreal; even fantastical and brutally honest. Writer director Damien Chazelle highly anticipated ode to ‘olde’ Hollywood finally released in India on Friday, after a preview screening a few weeks back.

To the uninitiated, La La Land’s references may go unnoticed. For instance, Chazelle has deliberately added the very same window from Casablanca where Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart peer into the distance. Then there are the protagonists’ dance sequences in two-tone shoes harking back to Fred Astaire and Ginger Roberts and other classical screen couples. But it doesn’t matter if the allusions are missed. Chazelle has created a work that probably transcends cultures with beautiful colours and a love story that everyone will relate to.

Mia Dolon (Emma Stone) is a struggling actor in LA who meets jazz pianist Sebastian Wilder (Ryan Gosling) through a series of chance encounters. Each get an opportunity to be nasty to each other. So their union is all the more endearing. Theirs is a love story that’s painfully corny (without being cringe-worthy) but with fresh emotions and an old-world romance in 2016. In this age of Tinder and flagrant hook-ups, here’s a couple that hesitate to hold hands. Their eventual kiss – after a montage of flying through a star-studded sky no less – is like fireworks. And yet, when the courtship is over and the relationship begins, Chazelle knows exactly how to bring alive our human dreams and ambition, the struggle for success and the yearning for a connection.

Chazelle’s cinematic effort is only accentuated by his lead actors. Gosling is of course lovely to look at on the big screen: his character’s passion for jazz, enduring hunger for success and love for Mia is heart-warming. But the Canadian dreamboat only plays second fiddle to the real star of the film. Stone’s performance reaches deep into the audience. She deftly pulls off being silly, funny and even broken and defeated.

Gosling and Stone’s duet of ‘City of Stars’ is one of those emotional earworms that can’t help but linger. There’s also Stone’s soaring ‘Here’s to the hearts’ to wait for. 

Read full review at The Hindu

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Movie Rating ★★★✭☆

This musical has all the joy and wonder of love

 Love is a many-splendored thing. But really all it needs is a girl in a yellow dress, against a violet-hued evening sky, in the soft light of a lamp-post, with a boy carrying her strappy blue heels.

Damien Chazelle’s La La Land knows what love is about. His directorial venture after the Oscar success Whiplash shimmers with it. And that word is not to be taken lightly. As Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), two kindred, struggling artistes, find their way towards each other in a city (Los Angeles) that feeds on dreams, our heart is hardly ever in its place. Every joy, ache, wonder the two feel is wonderfully expressed and joyously captured by Chazelle.

It lies in the songs (original music by Chazelle friend and regular collaborator Justin Hurwitz, original lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul) it lies in Mia and Sebastian’s twirl, it lies in the skip in their feet, it lies in how she lifts the edge of her dress waiting to be swept into dance, and it lies in how he tucks his one hand into his trouser pocket to take her there.

The scene at the theatre —

in a film that is so obviously an ode to the Hollywood and musicals of yore, but also the power of cinema, in the little stroll Mia and Sebastian take through the Warner Brothers Studios — is lyrical in how the girl and boy locate each other in the theatre and sit in tenuous anticipation, their knees just knocking, their hands just touching.

Chazelle tops this with a visit to the Griffith Observatory, where in another of those magical moments — magical despite our most cynical selves — Sebastian and Mia literally walk among the stars.

 Once the love is done though, Chazelle flounders. The conflict, such as it is, seems forced. And the debate, between pure art and a compromise, seems to be around just to propel the story forward. The idea is as casually dispensed with as it is introduced, and Sebastian’s passionate explanation of jazz history to Mia is almost laughable in how amateurish it sounds.

If Sebastian is holding up the end of the artist with the oldest dilemma in the world, Mia gets a shorter, almost cruel shrift. Pummelled in countless auditions where few pay her any attention, she writes and stages a solo act that Chazelle pays almost no attention to. That is the one work of sincerest, hardest creativity here, and the pains and labour of it (something so vivaciously on display in Chazelle’s other writer-director venture Whiplash) are of no concern. Chazelle also does Simmons no credit in the role given to him here after Whiplash.

The other turn in Mia’s life is almost as unbelievable as this part, as anyone making a career would vouch for.

However, that is not to take anything away from the many achievements of this rare musical, which serenades rather than spins: the opening sequence, where the song ‘Another Day of Sun’ almost bursts forth from a miles-long traffic jam; the twirl by the lamp-post in ‘A Lovely Night’; the haunting yearning of ‘City of Stars’; and especially, especially the desperation and virtuosity of Mia’s audition with ‘The Fools Who Dream’.

However, the film’s greatest achievement may yet be giving us those glorious evenings (full marks to cinematographer Linus Sandgren) — barely acknowledged, rare to come by, hard to forget, still aglow in the warmth of the day, still carrying the promise of the night. A la la land

Read full review at The Indian Express

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Movie  Rating ★★★★★  

A glorious cinematic experience

La La Land is a movie for now that belongs to the ages. A musical romance whose song and dance routines soar and swing so that they burst with a ready, real emotion, Damien Chazelle's film is a celebration of filmmaking that fittingly turns on the struggles of artists. The direction is dazzling but never oppressive – there's an upswing of the fantastic which is liberating. "Here's to the fools who dream," declares one song, and that's a perfect encapsulation of this wonderful experience.

Chazelle treats the musical sequences not as a formal counterpoint to the dramatic scenes, but a continuation full of possibilities. The moment between speaking and singing has the lightest of touches, as if the everyday just tips over into the extraordinary so that a stroll becomes a shuffle. The filmmaking techniques in La La Land, such as a handheld camera tracking a singer through their apartment to create an intimate sense of excitement, are alive with possibility.

Like Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, another film where music intermingles with dialogue and convention falls away, La La Land is set in Los Angeles. It opens atop a jammed freeway ramp, so the cars seemingly stretch to the horizon, and when the various drivers break into the shared song Another Day of Sun they become a joyous flash mob that sets the city as a stage.

Left in their wake, tooting their horns at each other before offering more explicit feedback, are Mia (Emma Stone), a struggling actress working a coffee shop gig and the audition circuit, and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a young jazz musician stuck in a doleful rut because of failed plans. They meet, and fail to connect, repeatedly, which is one of the first signs that Chazelle's movie has a tougher emotional outlook than the melodies suggest.

To have creative hopes in this Cinemascope-wide landscape is to endure rejection. Mia's auditions are casual exercises in cruelty, while Sebastian must play the corniest arrangements of Christmas songs when he plays a shift at the restaurant run by Bill (J.K. Simmons). What the movie reveals is that making it requires self-belief fostered by someone who believes in you, and that taking it might mean leaving them behind.

Stone and Gosling had a flinty playfulness to their exchanges in 2011's Crazy, Stupid, Love, and the misfortune to be cast in 2013's dire Gangster Squad, but here they sparkle with a romantic give and take that also plays to their individual strengths. Stone's liquid-like emotional openness is racked by self-doubt, while Gosling undercuts his movie star reserve with geeky eruptions of enthusiasm. They are total aces together.

Neither star has an authoritative voice or dazzling dance skills, but that suits the luminous flow of the songs, which were composed by Justin Hurwitz with lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Being good instead of great accentuates the character's connection, particularly in a terrific sequence early on in which Mia and Sebastian dance together while lamenting that they're wasting a beautiful evening with one another; the choreography furthers the story.

In Chazelle's breakthrough film, 2013's Whiplash, a jazz drummer's quest for greatness nearly shatters him, but the danger here is compromise, as Sebastian experiences when he joins a soon successful band run by a contemporary, Keith (John Legend). Holding onto the past, whether in the form of a style you revere or someone you love, can sometimes mean denying the future, and the sadness of separation is as powerful here as the thrill of discovery.

 Chazelle references, openly and with great affection, the 1950s Hollywood production numbers of Vincente Minnelli (An American in Paris) and Jacques Demy's 1960s French musicals (The Young Girls of Rochefort). But his film flows past mere homage, with striking pops of red and yellow in the production design and the ability to pull in tight for a painful argument about artistic responsibility between Mia and Sebastian.

La La Land, which is the best movie I saw in 2016, is a celebration and defence of 20th-century movements, whether classic jazz or Hollywood's Golden Age, but its advocacy is bound up in heartfelt connection and unsparing regret. The extended final sequence takes everything that has occurred and remakes it so that happiness seemingly lasts for both a few perfect moments and many years. It's incandescent and heartbreaking at the same time. Here's to the fools who dream.

Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald

Movie Rating ★★★★

  

In ‘La La Land,’ Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling pay homage to the musical

La La Land,” Damien Chazelle’s exuberant, thoughtful ode to bygone movie musicals, begins with two bravura gestures. After a retro-looking CinemaScope logo announcing the film’s big-screen purists’ credentials, it opens in earnest with an exhilarating, wildly ambitious production number during which dozens of Los Angeles strivers sing and dance atop their cars during a highway traffic jam.

Bright, primary-hued and boldly staged as if to occur in one unbroken shot, that prologue sets the stage for what’s to come: a nostalgic boy-meets-girl romance shot through with winsome musical numbers and modestly charming dance numbers that, at its core, makes a dazzling case for movies as they used to be. With “La La Land,” Chazelle seems to be staking his claim, not only as a passionate preserver of cinema’s most cherished genres (he made his mark a few years ago with his breakthrough drama “Whiplash”), but also a savior of the medium itself.

Working together for the third time, Stone and Gosling quickly establish an easy rapport with one another, their surpassingly attractive physical features the perfect foils for Chazelle’s aesthetic approach of naturalism and extreme stylization. Neither is a particularly gifted singer or dancer, but that hardly matters in a film that sweeps them up as if carried by a swirling force of nature: They have the unforced grace of natural performers, lending an offhand rakishness to every step they take. In addition to being fine actors in their own right, their gifts dovetail perfectly with composer Justin Hurwitz’s ingenious songs, and have been lent even more sparkle by Tom Cross’s crisp editing — which stays gratifyingly quiet during the gracefully filmed dance sequences.

One of the movie’s themes is the often absurd pursuit of stardom that defines Los Angeles at its most shallow and careerist. Chazelle lards his script with little digs at showbiz jargon. (A young screenwriter Mia meets proudly announces his “knack for world-building.”) The film is literally inscribed with Hollywood’s mythic past, from such familiar backdrops as the Griffith Observatory to the movie star murals on the city’s streets. The subtext is that it has two stars at its center who can convey hunger and avidity at one moment and a shiny sense of preordained fame and fortune the next.

But the real star in “La La Land” is the movie itself, which pulses and glows like a living thing in its own right, as if the MGM musicals of the “Singin’ in the Rain” era had a love child with the more abstract confections of Jacques Demy, creating a new kind of knowing, self-aware genre that rewards the audience with all the indulgences they crave — beautiful sets and costumes, fanciful staging and choreography, witty songs, escapist wish-fulfillment — while commenting on them from the sidelines.

In Chazelle’s case, that commentary isn’t ironic: It isn’t delivered with pompous eye-rolls or scare quotes. Instead, he harbors a genuine loving concern for a cinema that, in an age dominated by comic-book spectacles and stories dumbed down and miniaturized to fit an iPhone, is on the verge of losing the scale and sweep and narrative values that defined and distinguished it in the first place.

Throughout “La La Land,” Gosling’s character bemoans the state of jazz as a bastardized art form, further sullied by an audience indifferent to quality, originality and virtuosity. It’s difficult not to hear the filmmaker himself in those words, anxiously observing how the art form he first fell in love with is undergoing existential transformation. In “La La Land,” his answer is clear: The best way to deal with something that is shifting and changing under your feet — whether it’s love, life or art — is to just keep dancing.

 Read full review washington post

Movie Rating ★★★★★

Musicals often take audiences by surprise, even when they know what to expect, so, sensibly, director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) loses little time in confirming his syncopated intentions. It’s gridlock on a Los Angeles freeway on a sunny day – nobody is going anywhere – when suddenly car doors are thrown open, good-looking drivers are out and dancing and the whole company launches into Another Day Of Sun, a stunning and quite brilliantly choreographed routine captured in long, sweeping takes by Linus Sandgren’s equally fleet-footed camerawork.

In less than five glorious minutes, two crucial basics have been established – it’s a musical and it’s a promisingly good one.

Underpinning its considerable appeal are two wonderful performances, from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, both deservedly nominated for top acting honours at tonight’s ceremony. Thank goodness they’re not in competition with each other, as I spent most of the film changing my mind about which of them was better. One moment it was Gosling, as Sebastian, the jazz-loving pianist who dreams of opening his own club, the next it was Stone’s Mia, the wannabe actress who serves cappuccinos to real film stars while she waits for her big break. Or, indeed, any break.

Gosling’s effortless-looking performance is relaxed, understated and, thanks to months of piano lessons, totally convincing. But it’s Stone who captures the heart, with a performance that runs the full emotional gamut from vulnerable to tough, with a generous dollop of delightful flirtatiousness in between. Seb and Mia’s inevitable relationship has several false starts – one, indeed, in the traffic jam of the opening number – but it’s when their paths cross at a glamorous pool party that the real magic starts.

She’s just there, one suspects, to make up the pretty-girl numbers, while – having been sacked from his last job playing background music in a restaurant – he’s reluctantly playing keyboards in an Eighties covers band, garish tracksuit and all. They ask for requests, she asks for I Ran by A Flock Of Seagulls and we’re away.

It’s a fair while before their first song-and-dance number together but it’s worth the wait, as modern-day Hollywood makes way for the sort of heightened reality more reminiscent of the golden age of musicals, a time when no leading lady would venture out without a pair of tap-shoes in her bag. Just in case.

As they launch into City Of Stars for the first time (its melancholic but distinctly catchy refrain is much reprised), what makes it particularly touching is Chazelle’s decision not to muck about with their singing. Both are competent but hardly brilliant singers and not disguising that fact is definitely the right choice.

Yes, they may be tap-dancing away in the best tradition of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but those slightly fragile-sounding voices ensure they’re far more believable as a couple and we’re more emotionally invested as a result. We want them to fall in love, we want them to realise their respective dreams, we want them to live happily ever after. But can they? Without selling out? In the madness that is La La Land?

Inevitably, the film is going to have trouble living up to the hype, particularly as Chazelle’s own screenplay predictably decides that life for Mia and Seb should grow more complicated in the second half and the mood inevitably darkens. But I’ve seen it twice now and enjoyed it more the second time.

I love Mia’s endurance of the humiliations of auditions, the girls’ night out with her flatmates in their swishy, primary-colour dresses, and Seb’s passion for jazz, which, given that this is Chazelle’s second film in a row in which jazz plays a key role, is clearly echoing the director’s own.

I’m still not sure what it’s properly about – whether it’s possible to have it all, perhaps, or the fact that life can turn on a few key moments – but that doesn’t matter. This is one of those films where the pleasure is in the journey rather than the destination, and it gets the new film year off to the most wonderful start.

 Read full review at Daily Mail

RYAN GOSLING AND EMMA STONE TWIRL 'LA LA LAND' TOWARD GREATNESS  

Damien Chazelle's followup to 'Whiplash' resurrects the old Hollywood musical to delightful effect    

 Success can go to a filmmaker’s head, as it did Francis Ford Coppola’s. It can make them anxious or suspicious, as it did Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese. But sometimes it warms a director up like the sun, and the result is as gorgeous a toasty splash of sound and color as Damien Chazelle’s La La Land.

An enchanting valentine to the Hollywood musical that will have you purring with pleasure, the film is a follow-up to Whiplash, Chazelle’s 2014 film about the tough love between a jazz drummer and his teacher. The script for La La Land actually predates the filming of Whiplash: Chazelle wrote it in 2010, while he was still looking for a way into the film industry. But in many ways it feels like its heir, a response to the embrace Whiplash received at the Oscars, where it was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning three—for best supporting actor, film editing and sound mixing. La La Land doubles down: If Hollywood loves Damien Chazelle, Damien Chazelle loves it right back. 

 We’ve been here before, although not recently. The road to resuscitating the Hollywood musical—which is to say, an original screen musical as opposed to an adapted Broadway show, such as Chicago —is beset with honorable failures from major auteurs: Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977) sank beneath its own romantic psychodrama; Coppola’s One From the Heart (1981) eventually bankrupted the filmmaker and closed Zoetrope Studios; Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You (1996) was liked by critics but achieved only semi-liftoff with audiences. At first, Chazelle courts death by set piece, throwing swimming pools and parties and champagne at the screen in a series of showstoppers whose invention feels both delightful and a little heavy, like a diet of nothing but cream. Can he keep it up? Should he? Can anyone handle two hours of fizz?

In the end, La La Land succeeds because it realizes that being a musical is not enough. It wasn’t enough for the original audiences of the 1930s and ’40s, who unlike us, weren’t indulging in anything as gauzy as genre resuscitation or nostalgia: They went to see Fred and Ginger, or, later, Gene Kelly hoofing it with Cyd Charisse. The delay between writing the script and filming allowed Chazelle to land Gosling and Stone, whose chemistry—first on display in 2011, in Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s Crazy, Stupid Love— still rests on the slight suspicion that he thinks himself more of a catch than she does.

David Wasco, the production designer who did such great work creating Jack Rabbit Slim’s restaurant in Pulp Fiction, concocts an L.A. of twinkling lights and neon signage, building fronts and palm trees, silhouetted against the violet-and-orange twilight by cinematographer Linus Sandgren. I haven't seen a movie so in love with the magic hour since Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven in 1978.

The plot—her artistic career competes with his artistic career—is an old one, A Star Is Born for the iTunes generation. What keeps the film from being mere pastiche or homage is the same hard edge that drove Whiplash to its astonishing conclusion, in which art was dug out from an earth scorched of close personal relationships. Great art, for Chazelle—even great escapist art like La La Land —is Faustian in nature. There can be no compromise. You can have the fantasy or you can have the reality, Chazelle suggests, but you cannot, even after a couple of hours of the rarest enchantment, have both.

Read full review at Newsweek