It's another movie about hollywood and movies

>It's another movie about hollywood and movies

I feel like there is a new one every year. They always seem to get critical acclaim, win a major Oscar and then are instantly forgotten.

Can't wait to see it.

Expect to be let down by this bore of a movie

>Why is La La Land so charmless yet so wildly overpraised? It is the work of 31-year-old Damien Chazelle, a movie buff turned director who has no knack for the popular culture he imitates and who is temperamentally distanced from the work ethic he takes as his subject. The two lovers in La La Land, Emma Stone as struggling actress Mia and Ryan Gosling as struggling pianist Sebastian, traverse Los Angeles’s showbiz subculture as projections of Chazelle’s own ambition. Their first stumbles, then inevitable success, glorify Chazelle’s own accomplishments and increase his sense of entitlement; it’s the same cliché that Chazelle tried passing off as unstoppable ambition in his previous film, the ridiculous jazz-psychodrama Whiplash.

>TV-bred and hype-oriented journalists, who are equally remote from pop culture and working-class life, are applauding the solipsism in La La Land as new and original. But their praise reflects only the cultural illiteracy Chazelle represents, an idiocy that has contributed to the breakdown of film culture this millennium.

>Sorry to get all esoteric about a movie most people will stare back at in dumbfounded disbelief, but La La Land (like Whiplash) is a departure from the old notion that movies should be edifying (much as we’ve forgotten the idea of public service as a virtue and now see it as a reward of egotism). A certain fundamental spiritual belief is missing from La La Land’s ersatz movie-musical conceit. Chazelle’s depiction of career conflict and erotic attraction in Mia and Sebastian’s romance — the un-lyrical cheeriness and nervously paced fantasy scenes — prevents La La Land from being a satisfying movie musical. He imitates the generic form but never imbues it with feeling.

>The opening musical number (“Another Day of Sun”), in which a traffic jam on the L.A. freeway turns into a dance routine by frustrated drivers who leap out of their cars and prance about dressed in pastel colors, is an embarrassment. Off-key in several ways, the set-up makes no sense, the song’s ironic uplift is cheesy, the choreography is chaotic, and the preening multiculturalism of the dancers (soon forgotten in the whites-only love story) feels forced and insulting.

>To connect this inept endeavor to the great movie musicals is merely wishful, but reviewers congratulate themselves because it is also arcane. That freeway free-for-all is modeled after French director Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), a musical experiment that portrayed Demy’s spiritual ambition. (It followed Demy’s masterpieces Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which redefined cinema by mixing genres and finding existential profundity in what was previously dismissed as frivolous.)

>Chazelle’s approach to storytelling and cinema history has no spiritual basis. He lacks Demy’s understanding of movie-musical tradition — that musicals must demonstrate feelings that can be expressed only through song and dance. Uninterested in the effable, Chazelle settles for being a show-off. Every musical number intrudes into bland, recitative scenes without transporting them into levity or passion. La La Land is all hollow gimmickry (it begins by announcing Chazelle’s use of the widescreen CinemaScope frame), which naïve Millennials find easier to comprehend than Demy’s unique, self-examining genre mash-up avant la lettre.

Anyone who becomes a professional filmmaker has probably devoted the majority of his/her life to watching movies, working on movie sets, writing movies, making movies, etc. Most writers get their inspiration from real-life experience. This isn't rocket science.

Oh shit, it's made by the Whiplash guy??
brb getting a ticket.

>In this sense, La La Land continues in the inauthentic mode that Millennials inherited after the indie film movement sank under the wright of its own narcissism. This is often the hidden subject of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films — specifically his quasi-musical Punch Drunk Love. But La La Land also imitates the snarky genre pastiche of Quentin Tarantino’s neo-noirs. But Chazelle’s overture to road rage is unconvincing because it lacks profanity, violence, and aggression — the realistic urban-trash texture that, as filtered through junk movies, inspired the undeniably proficient Tarantino, the first film-buff director to idiotically repeat film history.

>Chazelle is false to his own premise; he lacks both Tarantino’s idiosyncrasy and Demy’s Franco-American sophistication. (La La Land’s attempts at matching color schemes offend the memory of Demy’s visually harmonized emotions and his high aestheticism in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. This junk is more like the now-forgotten silent atrocity The Artist.) Plus, the charmless Stone and Gosling and the smug John Legend sing and dance without grace. How awful is all this? La La Land makes one long for a Quentin Tarantino musical.

I'll watch it with expectations at a minimum.

>gave Patriots Day a good review

what a fucking surprise.