Is this the worst film of all time?

Is this the worst film of all time?

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fuck you it was great

If you want

I haven't seen it so possibly.

Kys reddit

Well any movie that critics like is the worst movie of all time according to Sup Forums.

Yes only redditors like such hamfisted bollocks.

Ohh edgy, calling an Oscar front runner the worst film of all time. Haven't heard that before.

Figures Sup Forums hates it. Bunch of virgins never had a girlfriend.

cry more faggot

Speak for yourself

If it wasn't for "twist" ending it would be completely mediocre. It still is quite mediocre.

I'll be pissed if they win best actor/actress because they really don't deserve it.

But it's essentially sucking Hollywood dick so it'll win all sorts of awards.

if you like this movie you're reddit
if you hate this movie you're reddit

how do i win Sup Forums?

and why do we hate reddit all of a sudden?

letterboxd.com/glazomaniac/film/la-la-land/
yes

Worst? No. Most filmically dishonest? It's a serious contender.

>shitty critic/meme bait

We need someone who's actually good to put our insecurities onto.

>Sup Forums """"intellectuals""""

>Sup Forums intellectual btfo's everyone by replying to comments disagreeing with him

w e w l a d

If you're a sad fuck then maybe it is.

Get a load of this guy

capeshit for middlebrows

There's a moment early on this film that nicely summarizes Damien Chazelle's approach to music and art: Ryan Gosling, sitting at his piano, puts on a jazz record, which begins with a complicated piano riff. He stops the record, plays the riff on his piano exactly as heard on the record, messes up, then spins back the record, replays the opening, and mimics it again. It's the same methodology behind the "Play one wrong note and you DIE" premise of the Chazelle-penned Grand Piano and the keep-the-tempo obsessiveness of Whiplash. Great artistry is about hitting your cues, keeping the rhythm, getting the notes right. Interpretation, originality, feeling are ignored in favor of technical proficiency. One wonders if Chazelle's kindergarten teachers indoctrinated him with this draw-inside-the-lines ethos or if it developed naturally from a lack of imagination.

It's an ethos that extends to his formalism too, all swooping cranes and tracks exactly in time to the characters' movements, in and out of rooms, through corridors and down streets, moving up towards the sky for the perfect landing. But all the motion ends up constricting rather than opening up the characters' movements; there's no spontaneity in the blocking, no freedom in the steps. It's all hard and fast. There's no grace.

It's for the better, I guess; remove the formal showiness and there'd be no cover for the mediocre dancing, set to a mediocre jazz score. I mean, seriously, this is some straight out of undergraduate dramatic arts program, off Broadway, Michael Buble material. And I know that makes me sound like an elitist, but there's the rub: Chazelle can't keep making movies about artistic excellence if he's going to keep filling them with subpar artistry.

And what is Chazelle if not an elitist, railing against the gluten-free pastry consumers of the world and the strict enforcers of tacky setlists (in what world does Chazelle live in that a high end restaurant in LA wouldn't want their performer playing free jazz?). He needs to set up strawmen for his protagonists to come in conflict with because he doesn't trust the audience to grasp that his leads are superior simply from watching them, and he's right. He needs antagonists to stack them up against, to prove their superiority. This tendency culminates in the shockingly awful John Legend subplot, in which Chazelle focuses his ire on the introduction of synths and pop into jazz music (because this is the 1980s, apparently). But the joke's on him: there's no difference in quality between Legend's pop concert extravaganza and the music proper in the film. Mediocre is mediocre, with synths or without.

THIS

Heard there was some big twist that makes everyone cry. What's the twist here?

Its close

CW: white supremacy/racism/whiteness, gender

"you cannot be proud of being white & not be a racist. it's a tautology. you can be proud of your irish heritage. you can be proud of your german heritage. you can be proud of your lutheran heritage or your appalachian roots or your large italian family's sunday gravy tradition. you cannot be proud of your *white* heritage b/c there is no such thing. whiteness only exists as a power relationship. a system of domination is not a culture to take pride in unless you are an asshole." - k.m.

k. very succinctly covers it, though others have said this before in other ways. This one just happens to be the one I remember most clearly at the moment (because I saw it recently). One of the ways in which whiteness maintains its dominance is by defining itself as the standard by which other things are judged. The "no accent" voice most people think of is a white Midwestern American accent. The "lowest common denominator" that most marketers, advertisers, and Hollywood executives warp their output toward is based on standards developed with white people in mind. Because whiteness is a system of dominance, it subsumes other races and cultures into it; literally everyone within a white supremacist society interacts with and experiences whiteness. Only some are able to benefit from it; many (most?) suffer from its exclusion of, exploitation of, oppression of, repression of their existence.

With apologies, a white girl is going to talk about jazz: As I am given to understand, jazz was, more or less (because of bad record keeping at the time, the birth certificate of jazz is unclear on the precise location--white people demanding the full length version think it will reveal it was born in Omaha, but we all know better) born in a New Orleans flophouse, as known Caucasian Ryan Gosling says (thank you, nevin), failing to ever actually really explain it well. He mentions that the people didn't even speak the same language. He doesn't mention they weren't white. He doesn't mention what brought many of them there is that their ancestors were stolen from their homes and dragged across an ocean to be enslaved. He doesn't mention that jazz was appropriated by white musicians and white record executives and white club owners and white listeners; when confronted with the stereotypical blandness of Kenny G, he refers to passion and emotion and so on, but he doesn't talk about appropriation and history and how race played such a huge part in it all.

Some people will dismiss something as "too white." I will sign on: this film is too white. This is not a cultural designation; this is a note about how this film has no awareness of its cultural appropriation. This is a note about how this film sidelines every person of color. This is a note about how this film presents two main characters who replace personality with cuteness, whose entire arcs are predictable, starving artist tropes drawn from the aforementioned lowest common denominator, bland faces on bland plots on bland themes, and yet they are lauded and loved and celebrated and awarded for it. This is a note about how this film steals mythologies from black musicians and posits a white guy as some sort of passionate savior of jazz (in his own small way) while having judgment for a black man trying to make a living off a (supposedly) more accessible style.

Its the worst movie and anyone who like sit is lying to themselves

they give up after kinda sorta trying.
it is actually dishonest.

Celebrate this film for drawing from the history of musicals. You can feel Rogers and Astaire's "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" in spirit oozing out of "A Lovely Night," even if the dancing lacks the spectacle of the former. You can sense Singin' in the Rain in the big finale dream sequence. You cannot miss Jacques Demy even if you closed your eyes and ears and only sniffed the film from across the world. Yes, those musicals have their own problematic histories to contend with, but if we impose some limits on how far back we go, at least there's a line between these things and La La Land that doesn't entirely reek of treating the art of oppressed people as a smorgasbord. Celebrate, too, the fact that while this film isn't a model of gender equality (really if someone called me a baby for crying, I'd be so done), it still features a man ceding his romantic interests to a woman's career. It could have been handled better, but it still managed to surprise me. Celebrate that this film has a scene where two people float in the air and dance. Celebrate some of those shots, especially those beautiful views of the city.

But do so with acknowledgments of its flaws. This film is the middle-of-the-road sort of crowdpleaser people tell you it is because it is a product of whiteness.

@carter: In today's world, how is thinking that you're proud to be white (or any race) any different than thinking you're proud to be short, tall, skinny, brown-haired, or any other physical characteristic?
because whiteness is about a system of dominance and not an actual thing. it's arbitrarily applied to those who support it and not built upon any specific culture conquest. see the opening quote for a pretty clear distinction between cultures (which are part of whiteness) and whiteness itself. there's probably a better explanation out there. i am very, very tired. anyway, other physical characteristics aren't used as a basis for dominance and conquest.
@soda: i'm saying it should not have used jazz, or had a different story, or gone on a tangent, or woven the history of white appropriation of jazz music into the story, or not been told at all. any of those options would be preferable to another bland example of appropriation. this has been asked already, and henceforth, i will not be answering this again.
@anthony: Is David Rodigan, a British white male, a racist for making a career out of playing dub and reggae records all over the world?
does he use his privilege while doing so to benefit black musicians from whom he is appropriating? is he doing this in a manner that benefits those who he is stealing from more than himself? if not, then yeah, he's probably racist. if so... he's still probably racist.
Are white producers, who make music, clearly influenced by black culture, racist for using this influence?
they are benefiting from white privilege and appropriation at the expense of black people, so yes.
Am I racist for playing and listening to black music? Am I appropriating their culture?
i can't imagine that you're not.

Not even a pollack, but the constant white guilt gets on my nerves. Why are young white women such race traitors?

There isn't a twist, they just don't wind up together in the end. Not really even sad either because they both have happy successful lives.

>young white women

because they're white men, which are far worse