B and I saw the musical La-La Land two weeks ago in Sun Prairie and she’s still singing songs from it. She’s already bought the soundtrack so we can play it over and over at home, and I think she wants to see it again, too. I’d gladly go see it again if she asked me. And I know we’ll buy a copy of it when it’s released on DVD. That means it’s probably pretty good, right?
The film is about the relationship between an aspiring actor, played by Emma Stone, and a musician who wants to open his own jazz club, played by Ryan Gosling. They meet while they’re pursuing their dreams in Hollywood and, because this is a musical, they frequently break out in song to explain what they’re doing and why.
I love musicals, but it took a while for me to warm up to this one, and I’ll quickly add that I believe the reason was mostly technical. The opening number, Another Day of Sun, is a fabulous overture performed by dozens of people on an on-ramp of a Los Angeles freeway. The camera slowly pans over backed-up traffic and stops at a car where a woman sings the opening lines, which I could barely hear. Her voice, and the voice of every other singer in that number, was drowned like a sack of kittens by the music. There are few things that infuriate me more than somebody trying to drown a sack of kittens, and infuriated is not a good emotion to start a musical with.
The next number, Someone In the Crowd, suffered from the same problem, as did many of the other numbers, so my infuriation with this technical problem never entirely went away. I’ve since heard the soundtrack (as noted above, B replays it obsessively on Spotify, trying to learn the words) and I have no trouble at all hearing what the singers are saying, which leads me to believe that the theater’s sound system was somehow fucking it up.
So I was not really digging this movie until the scene where Stone and Gosling are walking along a road overlooking LA looking for her car and Gosling tells Stone that he’s not attracted to her. Stone returns fire, telling Gosling she’s not only not attracted to him, she’s double-anti-attracted to him, so there. All sung in verse, naturally.
I’m such a sucker for scenes like this. Boy meets girl, boy tells girl they’re not made for each other, audience can clearly see that boy and girl have a chemistry that will inevitably draw them together but, first they have to dance around it. And dance they do. In wing tip shoes, no less. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds flirted circles around each other just like this in Singing In The Rain.
After that scene, the movie had me. I even got all weepy-eyed for the ending. I’m a sap for romance, even if it doesn’t end the way I want it to (sometimes especially if it doesn’t end the way I want it to), so I couldn’t help myself. And there must be a lot of other people out there like me, because there was hardly a seat left at the screening we went to, and we had to check around at several theaters to get tickets for that. Glad we did. It was well worth the trip.
This Is Drivel 