La La Land

Just got back from the Cinema seeing this. Expected it to be terrible thanks to all the memeing on here but I thought it was above average desu. Granted it didn't reinvent cinema or tell a particularly interesting story but everything else was done to a very high level.

Best way to describe it is as a very well made Twilight I think, complete female wish fulfilment fantasy from start to finish and is all fluff no substance, but the fluff is all amazing. And movies that don't try to be deep are ok from time to time after all.

I think you're being terribly dishonest tbqh

its dishonest, desu.

This is the worst possible criticism of it I think. I don't think it attempts to be particularly deep or revolutionary at all, it just tries to be a fun cheap thrill. It's the media calling it an incredible work of art, not the film itself/

>above average desu

>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.

I agree the film has been overpraised, but I don't think it's bad. It's a fine film for what it is.

>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.

So you understand
Dishonest Filmmaking: (Tarantino, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Alex Garland, Paul Thomas Anderson, Nicholas Refn, Tom Hooper, Tyler Perry, Rian Johnson, Alfonso Cuaron, Noah Baumbach, Andrea Arnold, David Yates, Denis Vilenueve, James Franco, Steve McQueen) are intellectually bankrupt moral whores and charlatans; their films appeal to the modern phenomenon of the 'Pretend Epic' or Pseudo Cinema, often tied to the criticism that "It was a movie that thought it was a film" they have no ideas of their own and are filmed purely to have fancy essays made about them. They obfuscate their lack of insight under a smug impenetrable irony and often contain scenes with disingenuous attempts at depth with characters spouting platitudes that the director takes VERY seriously.
This directly panders to the IMDb reddit sensibility of quote circlejerking since these hacks are masters of the fools wit, "Quipping" (Not to be confused with the marvel co-opting of the word) , it sounds smart, cool and worldly but in reality there's nothing of substance, the Revenant's attempt at spiritualism was cheap and laughable and whilst someone like Malick has considered his philosophy, Inaurritu wears his introspection on his sleeve to give his film a false sense of depth with pathetic sermonising.

THIS is Dishonest Filmmaking.

They leech the greater works that preceded them; like The Enemy being a rip off Eraserhead, but they have nothing else to say.
They act under the guise of deconstruction with surface layer obvious 'social commentary' and a quirky forgettable score praised as 'innovative'. They are all inauthentic sycophants that rely on oscar buzz and post 9/11 detachment for relevance.

These directors are hacks and will be forgotten to time.

Some notably earnest filmmakers include, but are not limited to:
>Mike Leigh
>The Coen Brothers
>Werner Herzog
>James Cameron
>Mel Gibson
>Terrence Malick
>Gaspar Noe
>Clint Eastwood

>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.

>disingenuous attempts at depth

I don't think it does this at all though. It tries to be a fun love story which is pretty and with good music. Which it succeeds at.

>James Cameron
>Gaspar Noe

No. They are hacks and dishonest. Cameron is the most commercial thing in existence with hamfisted "corporation bad tree good" philosophy and Noe is all shock without any conviction or underlying themes.

>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.
lmao

Shill alert!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Its crap!

So you understand
Dishonest Filmmaking: (Welles, Jacques Demy, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Edmond T. Greville, Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, Tom Hooper, Tyler Perry, Rian Johnson, Alfonso Cuaron, Linkara, Andrea Arnold, David Yates, Martin Scorcese, James Franco, Steve McQueen) are intellectually bankrupt moral whores and charlatans; their films appeal to the modern phenomenon of the 'Pretend Epic' or Pseudo Cinema, often tied to the criticism that "It was a movie that thought it was a film" they have no ideas of their own and are filmed purely to have fancy essays made about them. They obfuscate their lack of insight under a smug impenetrable irony and often contain scenes with disingenuous attempts at depth with characters spouting platitudes that the director takes VERY seriously.
This directly panders to the IMDb reddit sensibility of quote circlejerking since these hacks are masters of the fools wit, "Quipping" (Not to be confused with the marvel co-opting of the word) , it sounds smart, cool and worldly but in reality there's nothing of substance, the Revenant's attempt at spiritualism was cheap and laughable and whilst someone like Malick has considered his philosophy, Inaurritu wears his introspection on his sleeve to give his film a false sense of depth with pathetic sermonising.

THIS is Dishonest Filmmaking.

They leech the greater works that preceded them; like The Enemy being a rip off Eraserhead, but they have nothing else to say.
They act under the guise of deconstruction with surface layer obvious 'social commentary' and a quirky forgettable score praised as 'innovative'. They are all inauthentic sycophants that rely on oscar buzz and post 9/11 detachment for relevance.

These directors are hacks and will be forgotten to time.

Some notably earnest filmmakers include, but are not limited to:
>Lindsay Ellis
>Terry Gilliam
>Werner Herzog
>Damien Chazelle
>Cher
>Terrence Malick
>John Ford
>Federico Fellini

I'm not surprised Sup Forums loves this movie. For whatever strengths in may possess, aesthetically and so on, at the heart of this film is an idealism for a so called "better" more idealistic time which appears to be at the heart of much of the reactionary thought that gets promoted here and in other boards. A need to revert back to how things were. What this film does is plays on the nostalgia of old Hollywood in all its Spectacle and glosses over the problems associated with it. Just as those nostalgic for "the good old days" where the American dream was still alive in the 50s, do in relation to politics.

>I'm not surprised Sup Forums loves this movie.

Has anyone ITT said they loved it lmao?

for

This movie looks like garbage. I can't even be bothered to download the screener. Hacksaw Ridge was the only big Hollywood kino this year.

Why did "dishonest" become a meme

It's just the new word for reddit, pretentious etc.

Sup Forums goes through cycles like that like faggot turning into cuck or edgelord turning into fedora

>meme
See

It's a cool fairytale about Hollywood. Nothing really bad, nothing really good. Watchable movie. 5/10, maybe 6/10.

Sick pasta

pretty apt desu

Parts of its construction were very good, parts of it were awful, averaging out to a 6.5/10 film I'd say. I certainly prefer something like this which knows what it is to some other things which want so desperately to be deep but arent.

I think I understand what this copypasta is trying to say but I honestly don't see anything wrong with simply wanting to make a good film that happens to take from films before it

I suppose in this sense you might call Don Hertzfeldt dishonest as well, and honestly that really fucking killed World Of Tomorrow for me (the bit about " spouting platitudes that the director takes VERY seriously" is immediately relatable to the big "Now is the envy of all the dead" speech at the end)

>Lindsay Ellis
>Linkara

Can we not bring internet filmmakers into this

> I've been to thousands of auditions and always do the same!
>Or there are people in the waiting room... who are like me, but nicer... and better, because maybe I'm not good enough!

That's the best part of the movie. And so so true. Doing auditions is the most depressing experience ever. You are always surrounded by people that looks like you. Everybody else at the movie is too cool.

It's not just that though, it's the whole pseudo-deep thing where movies hit you over the head with supposedly life changing moral messages in an attempt to seem smart without actually telling an interesting story or having good characters. Dishonest cinema is using your film as a vehicle to seem smart, or get an oscar, or get people to write about how amazing you are rather than make a good film.

Plenty of films do this and it's a very good desctiption, it's just I don't think La La Land does at all. The critics reaction to it has been moronic though.

>the fluff is all amazing

no

La La Land has great characters/story though. Simple, but well-drawn.

Sounds to me like dishonest filmmaking is basically just oscarbaiting.

Did you watch it at the cinema or on the screener? If you can't appreciate how good the film looked, the quality of the choreography and music then I feel sorry for you friend. Again it wasn't doing anything particularly revolutionary, but it was very well done. Nothing else was, the characters were pretty shallow caricatures we've seen 100 times before and the story was bog standard too, but all the fluff was great.

Would be interested to hear what you think a good musical is if you don't think this was an example of one

This was garbage user

>La La Land has great characters/story though

Completely disagree, they felt like vehicles to get an emotional reaction from women who like an extremely talented, but patient and devoted man who sees how she's more special than everyone else. She's a misunderstood genius with no real personality so women can imprint themselves on her.

This has been done 1000 times before, in twilight and in many other films and I thought they were both pretty shit. The look and the music was great though

>The Coen Brothers
>earnest
All of their movies are ironic wink-wink fests.

I hate James Cameron but the fact of the matter is the guy is into what he’s doing. He’s super commercial but that’s just what aligns with his natural taste; for him to do anything non-commercial would be, I guess, inauthentic. His philosophically retarded but he’s genuinely into it and that’s the distinction is making. EARNEST filmmakers, versus the dishonest or whatever.

And, yeah, the dishonest list is pretty stupid but I’m glad someone is exposing Tom Hooper for the true hack fraud he is.

>I’m glad someone is exposing Tom Hooper for the true hack fraud he is
I loved Les Miz but yeah fuck Tom Hooper.

Literally the only worthwhile bit of King's Speech was the scene in that room they use for porn where Colin Firth is cussing like a sailor. I know that's the most reddit part of the movie but it's at least entertaining.

Really like this post. Very well articulated, interesting point.

The characters are paper-thin and have zero life outside of the text. Stock characters with stock motivations (and very muddled, confusing motivations at that). Gosling and Stone are great performers so they make it work anyway.

Is La La Land a The Artist 2.0?

Agreed on The King’s Speech. Les Miserables is woefully directed but the actors kinda make it work in spite of itself. Hathaway deserves all of the golden-man-shaped praise she’s reviewed for it, Jackman isn’t the greatest actor in the world but he doesn’t need to be here - his sheer conviction is winning enough (this is the case for like 99% of Hugh Jackman’s roles) and even fucking Eddie Redmayne is not terrible (granted: this was before his spasticated twitchy faux-endearing twink shit got super, super grating). Still, Tom Hooper does not know the first thing about the syntax of cinema. Having a character stare directly into the camera at a super wide-angle lens (dutch-angled, of course) doesn’t work the first time he does it in Les Mis, and it certainly does not work the seventeen other times he does it. Hooper is a swarmy little inbred who’s obsessed with Kubrick and it shows in the worst ways possible. He has zero idea what he even likes Kubrick so he just misapplies his Kubrick’s stylistics to like The King Speech, which is why that film feels more like a goddamned fever-dream than the sorta-okay Forrest Gump oscar-bait shit its script actually is. Tonal discordancy at its worst.

Yes.

Said it before, will say it again.

Grease is a classic. La La Land will never be.

Why?

>the songs
>the characters
>the chemistry
>the talent
>the story

The songs in La La Land are well produced, but not catchy enough to stay. It doesn't help that most of them are sung by 2 people who basically can't sing.

A musical with 2 people who can't sing in the lead? Nope.

JT and ONJ should be the standard. Not professional singers but at least they can hold a note at a decent volume and don't have to be drowned out by overproduced music.

La La Land is a story about passion and I saw no passion displayed anywhere.

La La Land is the anti-grease and I don't understand why people are sucking its dick.

It's made by a 20 something that's still in love with Hollywood, so the story feels disingenuous, the music is forgettable and beyond opening scene and one other scene the choreography was laughable at points.

It was ambitious, that's the best I can give it. It does not deserve all the praise it is getting. In a couple of years people will call it overrated. I'm just ahead of the curve.

Les Miserables is way too long and could have really used some editing.

Stop complaining films based on actual musical productions with a new IP musical. Obviously, it's not going to be as catchy as flipping Chicago

>The songs in La La Land are well produced, but not catchy enough to stay
>implying Another Day Of Sun and Someone In The Crowd aren't still stuck in your head

They're certainly still stuck in mine.

Also I really want to learn how to play the theme despite not knowing how to play piano in the slightest.

>complaining
comparing

La La Land = Stranger Things for old people.

>but not catchy enough to stay

I found them plenty catchy and I though the singing was fine, certainly on a par with your average recent Disney movie song, though not as good as the very very best. Obviously it won't be an all time great like Grease but It was very well done none the less imo. Literally everything else you said is about character or plot which I already said are bad.

You seem to have taken the critics' opinions to heart a bit too much, because I don't think it ever took itself as seriously as they're claiming.

I'll compare musicals to musicals.

And you just gave a good reason why La La Land wasn't up to snuff.

Dishonest tripe.

I thought Korinefag hated Gaspar Noe

I haven't read the critics to be honest. I just like musicals and seen maybe a little too much to find La La Land anywhere near noteworthy.

I watch plenty too, living in London and completely disagree, must just be a preference thing.

Could be, personally, my biggest gripe was the lack of passion found in the songs.

>This junk is more like the now-forgotten silent atrocity The Artist.
kek

I thought there was quite a clear artistic vision throughout, with the colour pallet, decor, music and choreography all fitting together very well, making them all more than the sum of their parts. I really enjoyed the whole package, it's just a shame they slapped on a lowest common denominator women-bait plot onto it, they're lucky they had such good actors to save a terrible script.

Dishonest Filmmaking:(Tarantino, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, Alex Garland, Paul Thomas Anderson, Nicholas Refn, Tom Hooper, Tyler Perry, Gaspar Noe, The Coen Brothers, Noah Baumbach, Denis Vilenueve, James Franco, Damien Chazelle) are intellectually bankrupt moral whores and charlatans; their films appeal to the modern phenomenon of the 'Pretend Epic' or Pseudo Cinema, often tied to the criticism that "It was a movie that thought it was a film" they have no ideas of their own and are filmed purely to have fancy essays made about them. They obfuscate their lack of insight under a smug impenetrable irony and often contain scenes with disingenuous attempts at depth with characters spouting platitudes that the director takes VERY seriously.
This directly panders to the IMDb reddit sensibility of quote circlejerking since these hacks are masters of the fools wit, "Quipping" (Not to be confused with the marvel co-opting of the word) , it sounds smart, cool and worldly but in reality there's nothing of substance, the Revenant's attempt at spiritualism was cheap and laughable and whilst someone like Malick has considered his philosophy, Inaurritu wears his introspection on his sleeve to give his film a false sense of depth with pathetic sermonising.

THIS is Dishonest Filmmaking.

They leech the greater works that preceded them; like The Enemy being a rip off Eraserhead, but they have nothing else to say.They act under the guise of deconstruction with surface layer obvious 'social commentary' and a quirky forgettable score praised as 'innovative'. They are all inauthentic sycophants that rely on oscar buzz and post 9/11 detachment for relevance.

These directors are hacks and will be forgotten to time. Some notably earnest filmmakers include, but are not limited to:
>Mike Leigh
>Alfonso Cuaron
>Werner Herzog
>Darren Aronofsky
>Mel Gibson
>Terrence Malick
>David Yates
>David Lynch
>Clint Eastwood

>I'll compare musicals to musicals.
So far you're comparing music from a film to a music from a Broadway musical.

Very accurate

David Yates is probably the worst offender on their too. A fraud tv director on the same level of hackery as JJ Abrams

So it's unfair to compare adaptations from a book to compare adaptations from a screenplay too?

Doesn't fly with me. The end product is what counts.

Why are you responding to yourself

>very well made Twilight
Don't care if bait, fuck off!
Female wish fulfillment? That implies there's nothing to Gosling but eye candy and kisses. He wants to play jazz the way he wants to in a club he can own and fucking does it. If this were female wish fulfillment, he would have quit playing jazz and allowed Mia to flourish while he becomes a dad, sacrificing everything in the tone of "I would die for you." THAT'S Twilight.

>quit playing jazz and allowed Mia to flourish while he becomes a dad, sacrificing everything in the tone of "I would die for you." THAT'S Twilight.

This didn't happen in Twilight at all though. In fact Edward stubbornly sticks to his principles about wanting to get married before having sex which almost breaks the whole thing up, and he eventually gets his way. Surely by your logic he would have just given in and done whatever she wanted.

Women like a strongly principled man, but only if he isn't a failure. You could see that in the film, when he either wasn't doing well or didn't stick by his principles she didn't like him. When he did both she got flashes imagining what her life could have been if they stuck it out. It's pure wish fulfilment mate, strikingly similar to Twilight actually.

You do know that Gosling actually sings and play/composes music on the sidelines right?
The tone-deaf retards that parrot the "they can't sing" meme is going too far.

>You do know that Gosling actually sings and play/composes music on the sidelines right?

So does Katy Perry, doesn't mean she can sing.

And ye, Gosling was on note. The notes were just not that hard to hit. That's all.

I just watched it yesterday while on a date and it failed to do anything new. It was the dishonest meme. Definitely a movie you should take a girl out to see.
On a different note, what was that thing Ryan Gosling was saying to describe something as bullshit?

> It was the dishonest meme

Nah the dishonest meme is for shit like Birdman which is constantly trying to be deep. La La Land doesn't do that at all.

>They leech the greater works that preceded them
>a quirky forgettable score praised as 'innovative'
You're right that it wasn't deep but it certainly brought nothing new and just worked off the greats of the past.

It's a litle flower in the concrete of capeshit

its a greasy half-crushed turd on the concrete of capeshit

LaLa = Kaka

Who praised the score?
The score of the whole movie revolves around a few themes that get repeated endlessly in all the pieces, it was pretty lazy.
Also not really jazz, just your run-of-the-mill musical songs.

I'm not praising the score, just quoting the dishonest meme. But what you are saying
>just your run-of-the-mill musical songs
is really the only point I'm trying to make about this movie. Same old stuff just in a current year package.

Dishonesty doesn't just mean trying hard to be deep it means trying hard to please the masses with generic unexciting shit filmmaking

lol I had to look David Yates up

Seems insulting to serious directors even mentioning this guy on a film board tbqh

>In fact Edward stubbornly sticks to his principles about wanting to get married before having sex which almost breaks the whole thing up In fact Edward stubbornly sticks to his principles about wanting to get married before having sex which almost breaks the whole thing up
I'm not sure if that was your intention but you just made twilight sound even less temptating. that's one ridiculously dumb plotpoint

should I ask a girl out to go see this movie?

inb4 normie, im not

This pasta switches which directors are in which category every single time someone posts it.

All these fools hand in hand over terms they can't even agree on.

>Gaspar Noe
>honest

That's some comedy gold.

If it’s a first date, don’t take her to the movies. Rookie mistake.

>he doesn't get that's the point
>they're ALL dishonest

As soon as La La Land swept the Golden Globes.

How is that dishonest if it knows what it's doing? Seems pretty honest to me.

People who lie know that they're lying, they are not being honest about it to others you retard.

Yes but how is La La Land lying about what it is at all?