Movie Review: La La Land 2017

Title: La La Land
Release Date: December 9, 2016
Director: Damien Chazelle
Production Company: Summit Entertainment | Marc Platt Productions | Impostor Pictures | Gilbert Films
Summary/Review:

This romantic comedy is built on the premise of big song and dance numbers from the Golden Age of Hollywood but set in the present day.  The movie stars Emma Stone as Mia Dolan, an aspiring actor frustrated by dead auditions, and Ryan Gosling as Sebastian Wilder, a jazz pianist taking on cheezy pop music gigs while hoping to open a classic jazz cafe. They meet cute, of course, and after some acrimony, they fall in love.  I’ll have to say that Gosling’s character comes across as a jerk, and unlike other romantic comedies, doesn’t soften that much over the course of the film.

Stone and Gosling aren’t trained dancers but that gives their performances a certain charm of ordinary people trying to fit into the Hollywood dream.  Los Angeles plays a big role in the film with many shots on-location at noted landmarks, and shot against the magic hour of sunset skies.

The song and dance numbers are great within the context of the film, but there’s nothing here I’d really want to listen to again.  The one exception is a song Mia sings for her big audition “The Fools Who Dream,” which reminds me a lot of the finale to The Muppet Movie thematically.  As strange as it may sound, La La Land and The Muppet Movie would make a great double feature.  It has is similar in some ways, but less cynical, than Steve Martin’s L.A. Story.

Not to get too spoilery, but after a year of romance, set against the seasons, Mia and Seb go their separate ways.  In a coda set five years later, they’ve each achieved their dreams, with Mia a movie star and Seb performing at his successful jazz club. There’s a dream sequence with a highly-stylized Hollywood rendition of what there life would be like if they’d stayed together. But what I really appreciate about this romantic comedy is that Mia and Seb do not get together at the end, nor do they mourn their lost love.  They recognize that their time together was valuable, but have moved on to other things, and that’s ok.  For all the tributes to Hollywood, that’s a message you rarely get from a Hollywood movie.

Rating: ***

Classic Movie Review: Metropolis (1927)

Title:  Metropolis 
Release Date: January 10, 1927
Director: Fritz Lang
Production Company: UFA
Summary/Review:

One of the earliest science fiction feature films,  the list of movies influenced by Metropolis is quite lengthy.  Set in a futuristic city of high towers and massive machinery, the city of Metropolis is ruled by the wealthy industrialist Joh Fredersen.  His son Freder enjoys an idyllic life until a woman named Maria invites him to come below the surface to see how his “brothers” are suffering.

Freder witnesses the grueling life of the workers on their machinery, and how the dead are casually disposed of after one of the machines explodes.  Unable to convince his father to improve conditions for the workers, Freder rebels and joins Maria in trying to lead the working people to a more equitable Metropolis.  Meanwhile, Fredersen enlists the inventor Rotwang to use a robot to impersonate Maria and discredit her with the workers. Rotwang has his own plans and various conflicts and tragedies occur before the film’s conclusion.

The dystopian world of Metropolis is all the more chilling considering this is a German film made just years before Hitler’s dictatorial regime came to power. I found it hard not to wonder if the actors in this film, especially the children, ended up becoming Nazis.  From a filmmaking perspective, it’s hard not to see why it’s so influential as the cinematography, set design, and special effects are spectacular.  Story wise, the film comes across a bit stiff, more of a preachy Socialist parable than a human story one can engage with.

Rating: ***1/2