Babylon: A Review - Damien Chazelle's Reach Exceeds His Grasp in Bloated Babylon

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A messy misfire of a movie that is not worth seeing in the theater but if you’re interested check it out when it hits streaming.

“BABYLON WILL BE LIKE SODOM AND GOMORRAH WHEN GOD OVERTHREW THEM. IT WILL NEVER BE INHABITED OR LIVED IN FOR GENERATIONS.” ISAIAH 13:19

I readily admit that I am a fan of director Damien Chazelle.

Chazelle’s first feature, Whiplash, which I recently re-watched, was a powerful announcement of the director’s arrival. La La Land, Chazelle’s second film, was an Oscar-winning blockbuster but also a subtle yet masterful movie that was considerably deeper than many understood. Chazelle’s third feature, the over-looked and undervalued First Man, was a brilliant and profound piece of cinema.

Now the Oscar-winning writer/director Chazelle is back with his newest film, the highly anticipated Babylon, starring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie.

With my Chazelle fandom as context, I’m sorry to have to report that Babylon, a three-hour and nine-minute, sprawling extravaganza, simply doesn’t work. It isn’t awful, but it isn’t good either.

Babylon chronicles a bevy of characters in the decadent and debauched old Hollywood of the late 1920’s as they navigate the industry’s transition from silent movies to talkies.

Even that description of the plot gives away the game as the film’s narrative is decidedly derivative. Other current filmmakers have made much better films on similar topics, be it P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights – which dramatized the porn industry’s drug-fueled move from film to digital, or even Quinten Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – which was about Hollywood’s transition from the studio system to the new Hollywood of the 1970’s.

Chazelle makes multiple references to both Boogie Nights and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, so much so that it seems to be an homage to those movies (it’s also an homage to Singing in the Rain and its coda seems to pay tribute to Kubrick’s 2001), but that doesn’t make his story any more original or compelling.

For example, just the casting of Pitt and Robbie – who both stared in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, has an air of homage to it. But when Robbie’s character sits in a movie theater and unleashes a million-watt smile when she hears the audience respond to her performance on-screen – which is an almost identical scene from when she played Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it feels less like homage and more like imitation.

GRIME AND GRIT UNDER THE GLITZ AND GLAMOUR

The first thirty minutes of Babylon are an extended, pre-title card sequence that revolves around a massive party at a Hollywood producer’s home in very rural Bel Air.

This party is meant to highlight the debauchery of both the roaring twenties and Hollywood at its height, but Chazelle, unlike say P.T. Anderson, is incapable of adequately portraying the grime and grit under the glitz and glamour.

The party, which features a bevy of bodily fluids – including a woman pissing on a guy to satiate his perversion and a midget with a fake giant cock ejaculating on a crowd (not to mention the pre-party close-up of an elephant’s asshole which then shits profusely on some poor bastard), and a cavalcade of cocaine use, as well as an ample supply of nudity, feels incongruously sterile.

Chazelle’s use of bodily fluids in the film (later on there’s a tsunami of vomit too) are cheap substitutes for realism, most notably the blood and guts of emotional realism, in a story that is never able to fully form truly human, multi-dimensional characters.

The debauched party scene is so cold, controlled and antiseptic that it comes across as a virginal, pre-pubescent boy’s naïve beliefs about what sex and drugs are like. Chazelle is that virginal, pre-pubescent boy.

Once the party ends and the title card presents itself, the story finally begins. The main characters are Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), the biggest silent movie star of the moment, Nellie LaRoy, a Clara Bow-esque “it” girl who gets her big break and makes the most of it, and Manny Torres (Diego Calves), a Mexican film assistant who loves movies and works his way up the Hollywood ladder by dealing with incorrigibles like Conrad and LaRoy.

There are two other semi-lead characters, jazz trumpeter Sydney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and cabaret singer/actress Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). Neither Sydney nor Lady Fay are fleshed out to any satisfactory degree, and their presence in the film feels more like a rather ham-handed attempt to appease the diversity gods rather than to advance the story. It is no fault of the actors, but one can’t help but think that if these two characters were cut, and the runtime of the movie was subsequently trimmed by thirty minutes or so, we’d all be better off.

The first act of the film was my least favorite part, but to its credit it does get incrementally better from there, but unfortunately it never soars.

The third act is much more blatantly symbolic than the previous acts, such as when Manny descends into a near literal hell that becomes more and more disgusting and denigrating with every circle, and that approach resonated with me, which was a contrast to the first half of the film.

ALL LIGHT, NO HEAT

Pitt’s acting mirrors the film’s failings and successes. In the first two-thirds of the movie, Pitt gives a rather shallow, smirky and one-note Pitt-ian performance. He’s Brad Pitt, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, playing a character that is one of the biggest movie stars in the world…get it? But in the third act, Pitt eschews his empty movie star magnetism for a melancholy that actually becomes quite moving.

Margot Robbie is a luminously beautiful women, and she’s certainly ambitious – not unlike her character Nellie LaRoy, but there is something off about her in every performance she gives (I also just saw her in the most recent David O. Russell film Amsterdam and oh dear…but that is a discussion for another day). Whether it’s her over-reliance on a sort of old-timey New Yawk accent or what, I can’t quite figure just yet, but she always appears to be “acting” and everything she does feels mechanical and manufactured.

In Babylon Robbie works her ass off, of that there is no doubt, but it never coalesces into anything captivating. There’s lots of over-the-top yelling and gyrating and manic pixie dream girl mania and hysteria, but never anything that ever feels genuine or grounded.

Diego Calva is a pleasing screen presence, but his character Manny is under-written, as is his love story, and he never really gets his hands wrapped around this whole unwieldy thing to find its sweet spot.

As for the rest of the cast, it’s a mixed bag or worse. For instance, Jean Smart is overall pretty dreadful as a gossip columnist, but she does give a very effective monologue late in the movie that works quite well.

Eric Roberts plays Nellie’s dad and is utterly atrocious.

Lukas Haas plays Conrad’s producer and best friend and it’s an awkward and totally forgettable piece of work.

Tobey Maguire plays a crazy mob boss in a scene that is very, very similar to the “Sister Christian” scene from Boogie Nights, except this time there’s no firecrackers but instead a bodyguard who spits at random intervals. The scene could’ve been great I suppose, but just never comes together, and Maguire’s character is a freaky sideshow lacking gravitas.

The biggest issue with the acting is the same issue with the movie, it’s all light and no heat. There’s lots of yelling but nobody says anything.

It must be said that Linus Sandgren’s cinematography is at times glorious (even when seen through a sub-par projector which unfortunately is the case in most theaters nowadays), and the music and score by Justin Hurwitz (who won an Academy Award for the music in La La Land) are terrific.

It’s somewhat intriguing that Babylon is either a companion piece to La La Land or its outright prequel. Chazelle makes this fact pretty clear by repeatedly using an integral piece of Hurwitz’s music from La La Land as a cornerstone of Babylon.

The ethereal La La Land - the dream of Hollywood, contrasted with the nightmare of Babylon, is an intriguing formula, if only Babylon could hold up its end of the bargain.

A MOVIE ABOUT THE END OF AN ERA, MADE AT THE END OF AN ERA

I concede that making a movie about the impact of technology on the movie business and how Hollywood ruthlessly makes difficult transitions, is insightful in this era where streaming moves the earth beneath Hollywood’s feet and, much to my chagrin, auteur movies - like Babylon, face the real possibility of extinction. I also admit that as a fan of Damien Chazelle and also due to the evolution/devolution of the film business which seriously threatens to end the auteur era which I love so much, there’s a part of me that desperately wants to adore Babylon and declare that making a decidedly decadent movie about Hollywood decadence is in fact clever if not ingenious, but if I’m being honest, I have to say it’s actually pretty trite.

Ultimately, I wanted Babylon to be great and to my disappointment it wasn’t even good, instead it’s a messy misfire of a movie that’s an empty imitation of other more worthy films. I cannot recommend seeing Babylon in the theatre, but if you really want to see it wait until it hits a streaming service, that way the long run time and derivative drama will be more digestible, if not necessarily palatable.

©2023

Oscar Nominations

The art and business of movies is in a dreadful state and the Oscars are in precipitous decline.

Hollywood got up bright and early this morning to hear who amongst them was nominated for an Academy Award. The rest of the world slept through the festivities, just like they will on March 27th when the actual awards are handed out.

‘The Power of the Dog’ was the big winner when it comes to nominations, garnering 12 including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting actor and Best Supporting Actress.

2021 has been the worst year for movies that I can remember, so the vastly overrated, middling, pretentious mess that is the arthouse poseur ‘The Power of the Dog’ being nominated for a bevy of Oscars comes as no surprise, and says a great deal about the current sorry state of not only the moviemaking business but the art of cinema. It also says a great deal more about the insipid taste of the Academy than it does about the cinematic value of the movie.

Other big winners when it comes to Oscar nominations are ‘Dune’ with ten nominations and ‘West Side Story’ and ‘Belfast’ with seven nods each.

The general public rightfully had no interest in Steven Spielberg’s virtue signaling song and dance routine so ‘West Side Story’ has been a big box office bomb. But not surprisingly, the Academy Awards slobbered all over Spielberg and his tired remake nominating it for, among other categories, Best Picture and Best Director.

‘Belfast’, the rather benign and banal arthouse fool’s gold from Kenneth Branagh, snagged seven nominations as well, including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Branagh himself.

Besides ‘The Power of the Dog’, ‘West Side Story’ and ‘Belfast’, the Best Picture category includes ‘King Richard’, ‘Licorice Pizza’, ‘Nightmare Alley’, ‘CODA’, ‘Don’t Look Up’, ‘Dune’ and ‘Drive My Car’.

This Best Picture lineup is, at best, a murderer’s row of mundane mediocrity, you’d be hard pressed to find even good movie among this lot, nevermind a great one.

‘King Richard’ is a mindless, middlebrow sports movie, ‘Licorice Pizza’ is a secondary effort from director P.T. Anderson, ‘Nightmare Alley’ is interesting but has been a dud at the box office and overlooked by critics, ‘CODA’ is basically a laughable amateurish Hallmark Channel movie, ‘Don’t Look Up’ is a scattered failure, ‘Dune’ is a cold but beautiful spectacle, and ‘Drive My Car’ is a Japanese film that virtually no one has seen.

As for the other categories, there will be lots of talk about who was snubbed. But the reality is that movies are so bad this year that you can’t really make a case that anyone got snubbed. For instance, Lady Gaga was awful in ‘The House of Gucci’, but that won’t stop her fans from bemoaning her lack of an acting nomination.

The other big story will be the alleged lack of diversity among the nominees. As always, there will be lots of manufactured outrage about how not enough people of color, minorities or artists from “marginalized groups” got recognized by the Academy.

For example, in the wake of the nomination being announced, the New York Times wrote an article “The Diversity of the Nominees Decreased” that lamented the omission of Jennifer Hudson and “her rousing performance as Aretha Franklin” in ‘Respect’ from the Best Actress category. That movie and Hudson’s performance in it were entirely forgettable, and of course, the Times doesn’t tell us who shouldn’t have been nominated instead of Hudson.

The NY Times does give a back handed compliment to the Academy for nominating Jane Campion and Ryusuku Hamaguchi in the Best Director category, which they say has been “historically dominated by white men”. That may be true, but also true is the fact that a in recent history a “white man” hasn’t won the award since Damien Chazelle in 2016, and only two “white men” have won the award in the last decade.

It's pretty clear that the “white men” nominated for Best Director this year, Kenneth Branagh for ‘Belfast’, P.T. Anderson for ‘Licorice Pizza’ and Steven Spielberg for ‘West Side Story’, need not show up for the awards because in the name of diversity there’s no way in hell they’re going to win.

Speaking of the slavish addiction to diversity over merit, for years now the Academy Awards have been slouching towards irrelevance, but it wasn’t until the #OscarsSoWhite protest gained traction after the Oscars committed the sin of nominating only white actors in every category in 2015 and 2016, that the Academy Awards went into hyperdrive on their march to oblivion.

The desperate need to appease the diversity gods has forced the Academy to expand its membership, both through adding more “minority” members and purging older white members. The result has been an Academy that has tarnished its brand, diminished the art of cinema, and lost its audience.

The ratings for the Oscar telecasts have been declining rapidly for years. In 2010, 41 million people watched the Oscar go to ‘The King’s Speech’. In 2021, just over 10 million people watched ‘Nomadland’ win the award.

The Oscar’s ratings for 2021 had dropped 56% from the previous year, and the ratings for this year’s ceremony will undoubtedly drop precipitously again.

The bottom line is that the Academy Awards are in a death spiral of irrelevance. Oscar’s demise is a symptom of the malignant malaise in moviemaking and the collapse of the art of cinema, and the truly atrocious line up of nominated films is undeniable proof of not only the Academy Award’s irrelevance but also the decrepit state of cinema.

 A version of this article was originally posted at RT.

©2022

Ford v Ferrari: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A conventional but very enjoyable and entertaining movie that will rev up your engine and get your heart racing.

Ford v Ferrari, written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and directed by James Mangold, is the story of American car designer Carroll Shelby and British race car driver Ken Miles as, amidst corporate intrigue, they try to build a car to compete at the 24 Hours of Le Mans against the juggernaut Ferrari racing team. The film stars Matt Damon as Shelby and Christian Bale as Miles, with supporting turns from Jon Bernthal, Tracy Letts, Caitriona Balfe and Josh Lucas.

Ford v Ferrari is an old-fashioned, meat and potatoes movie that twenty years ago would have been a prime prestige picture and sure fire Oscar contender. Nowadays, with our diversity obsessed woke culture, a movie like Ford v Ferrari, which is about white men accomplishing great things, is generally anathema. The film’s conventional narrative foundation and its traditional movie making approach don’t make for a particularly original cinematic experience, but it does make for an exceedingly entertaining one.

Ford v Ferrari is crowd-pleasing, and at times exhilarating, even within the confines of its familiar structure and simple cinematic aesthetic. The driving sequences are not exactly ground-breaking cinematography, as they are little more than a high-end car commercial, but coupled with stellar sound editing and design, film editing and a quality soundtrack, they become highly effective, if not down right heart pounding.

The cast also elevate the material, as both Matt Damon and Christian Bale give quality star performances.

Matt Damon is one of the very best movie star actors working in Hollywood right now. Damon is not Joaquin Phoenix, but he has enough acting chops and artistic integrity that he isn’t Matthew McConaughey or Ben Affleck either. Damon is consistently watchable and is able to carry a film with a subtlety and skill that few movie stars possess, and that skill is front and center in Ford v Ferrari. Carroll Shelby is a Texan, and at first blush that identity sits uncomfortably on Damon, but within moments he envelops the character and, like all good movie stars, turns Shelby into an extension of Matt Damon.

Christian Bale is maybe the least movie star movie star we’ve ever seen, as he seems to vanish into characters without a trace. In Ford v Ferrari, Bale gives a piss and vinegar performance full of humor and humanity that elevate the proceedings considerably.

Tracy Letts, Jon Bernthal, Caitronia Balfe and Josh Lucas all have small supporting roles, and none of them stand out as being note worthy or, to their credit, awful. The supporting roles are not especially full figured and fleshed out, but the cast make the most of what they’re given.

Ford v Ferrari’s director, James Mangold, is a film maker who has had one of the more baffling careers. Mangold started his career with a film I adored, Heavy, and seemed to be poised to be the next big thing in cinema. He followed up Heavy with Copland, which was a Sylvester Stallone reclamation project filled with acting heavy hitters like Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel. Ultimately Copland was an ambitious failure, but a failure nonetheless. After Copland, Mangold strung together a collection of unremarkable mainstream movies, such as Girl, Interrupted, Kate and Leopold, Walk the Line, Knight and Day and Wolverine. Mangold’s only noteworthy film of his entire career was his most recent, 2017’s Logan, which was a very dark take on the Wolverine character from X-Men.

Mangold’s biggest problem as a director is that he has no distinct cinematic style in general, and no visual aesthetic in particular. Even Logan, a film I loved, suffered from a rather flat and mundane look, which was a shame. The same middlebrow visual style is on display in Ford v Ferrari. That is not to say that the film looks bad, it doesn’t, as it is professionally and proficiently photographed, it is to say that the film does not look mind blowingly spectacular, which it could have. While the movie and its cinematographer Phedon Papamichael produce some very nice shots, overall it lacks a visual flair that other directors with more pronounced styles would have brought to it. For instance, it would have been interesting to see David Fincher’s or Christopher Nolan’s Ford v Ferrari. That said, Ford v Ferrari is still Mangold’s best film, even visually, and the movie’s outstanding pacing and dramatic momentum are his doing and he deserves all the credit.

The politics of Ford v Ferrari are sort of intriguing, as at one point it seemed to be just a shameless homage to corporate capitalism and the corruption inherent in it. But upon reflection, the film’s subversive spirit is more apparent, as the film actually has a populist, anti-corporate and nationalist heart beating beneath its undeniably mainstream facade.

It is due to the film’s white male centered narrative and its veneer of capitalistic flag waving, that I think the film will be either over-looked or outright snubbed come Oscar season. The film does not wear its populism, nationalism and anti-corporatism on its sleeve, which will no doubt make that message more palatable for those averse to it, but it also leaves it open to misinterpretation, and in our current culture of outrage, I suspect the movie will garner much outrage if it does make an Oscar push. Much like last year’s Neil Armstrong bio-pic First Man by director Damien Chazelle that was overlooked by the Academy Awards, Ford v Ferrari is telling a story of white male achievement that woke Hollywood is not interested in seeing or rewarding right now. The Ford v Ferrari’’s financial success, and it does appear to be on its way to a robust box office haul, is just more evidence of the gigantic split in perception and beliefs between Hollywood/the media and regular people/inhabitants of flyover country.

Ford v Ferrari is the kind of movie Hollywood used to make on a regular basis but rarely does at all anymore. The paucity of these sort of “grown-up” dramas is maybe why Ford v Ferrari is such a delicious cinematic indulgence. I am not much of a “car guy”, but I found Ford v Ferrari to be such an intoxicating movie that I left the theatre desperate to roll up my sleeves and get under the hood of a used muscle car. The film is definitely not perfect, and has some structural and dramatic missteps, but overall I found it to be a very enjoyable cinematic experience well worth your time and effort to see in the theatre, especially for the enhanced sound. This is the type of movie that regular people (non-cinephiles), will absolutely love, and rightfully so. So grab your keys, starts your engines, race through traffic and make a pit stop at your local cineplex to see Ford v Ferrari…it won’t be a life changing experience, but it will a very satisfying one.

©2019

First Man: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An unorthodox take on a “space movie” that I found to be ultimately satisfying and moving…but your mileage may vary.

First Man, written by Josh Singer and directed by Damien Chazelle, is the story of Neil Armstrong and his long march to the moon. The film stars Ryan Gosling as Armstrong, with supporting turns from Claire Foy, Jason Clarke and Kyle Chandler.

First Man is a film that, for good or for ill, defies expectations. One would expect a film about Neil Armstrong and NASA to be a “space” movie in the vein of the expansive The Right Stuff or Apollo 13, but First Man is not a conventional space movie but rather a painstakingly intimate movie that uses space as metaphor.

What makes Neil Armstrong such a compelling character not only in this film but in our culture, is that he was an exceedingly “normal” person. Armstrong was the everyman of the space program which turned him into a sort of empty vessel which the public could project upon whatever traits they wished. Armstrong was portrayed in the media as smart, strong, honorable, noble and patriotic, but what Chazelle does in First Man is make Armstrong less heroic and more human by showing him to be wounded.

Armstrong’s wound is so palpable and catastrophic that he must risk life and limb and travel 238,900 miles in an attempt to soothe it. Ultimately, Armstrong’s journey to the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, isn’t a running away from his wound, but a solemn yet desperate pilgrimage to it.

The moon in First Man is not a destination or ambition but a ghost, haunting Armstrong at every turn as he tries to take one small step for man through the fog of mourning in an attempt to regain his balance and find some semblance of normalcy once again.

By flouting “space movie” expectations, First Man can be a bit frustrating, but once you accept the premise and go along the dramatic journey, it becomes a remarkably satisfying and deeply moving experience. I readily admit that my own personal life experience made the film resonate with me and that others with a different life experience may not find it so worthwhile.

Emotional pull aside, director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, La La Land) shows a deft and skilled hand at the helm of First Man. Chazelle’s film wonderfully mirrors Armstrong the man and the character in that it is strictly compartmentalized. Armstrong walls off his emotions and contains his pain and Chazelle uses magnificent framing to express this dramatic reality.

Chazelle also pulls off shooting in very tight spaces, like in the cockpit of a space capsule, by embracing rather than shunning the claustrophobia of those places. Chazelle recreates the physically and emotionally suffocating experience of being compartmentalized to such a degree that you can’t even turn your head to look at the exit, never mind walk through it. Chazelle’s embrace of dramatic claustrophobia also pays off when the cinematic expanse of the moon is finally reached.

Ryan Gosling’s work as Neil Armstrong is spot on, as he keeps with the theme of the film by keeping Armstrong entirely contained. The pain pulsating through Gosling’s Armstrong is tangible, but he keeps it tightly controlled, never letting the wound gush, only fester. The final scene of the film beautifully illustrates Armstrong’s dilemma, he is walled off and isolated, if not quarantined, from the world, and even from his wife, and he is at a loss for words, but still has the desperate human need to connect, even if he is unable to.

The long journey of Armstrong to Lunar catharsis is so potent because it is so deftly and subtly portrayed by Gosling, who with First Man proves once again that he is more an actor than a movie star.

Claire Foy’s work as Janet, Armstrong’s wife, is equally compelling. Foy’s Janet is much more combustible than Neil, but that just means it takes more effort for her to keep herself together. Foy and Chazelle imbue Janet with a percolating dynamism through a focused intensity and a mildly floating hand-held camera that gives Janet the feel of being ever so slightly unbalanced and teetering out of control, like a satellite knocked off its orbit. Janet has a volcanic magnetism that is a testament to Foy’s making the most out of what, in lesser hands, would have been just another astronaut wife character, at best an adoring moon, but Foy’s Janet is a planet unto herself, spinning in a wilder orbit around a dying Sun.

The rest of the supporting cast, which includes Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll and Ciaran Hinds among many others, all do solid work in mostly underwritten roles. The supporting cast are most definitely very small pieces around the sun that is Ryan Gosling, who, along with Claire Foy, carry the emotional and dramatic weight of the picture.

First Man is really a story about alchemy through fire and ice (recurring themes throughout the film) and the psychological transformation and evolution that comes about through the alchemical Grail quest. Neil Armstrong’s connection to the cause of his existential anguish gets further and further away with every passing second, and he single-mindedly chases it through the fire of earth and its atmosphere all the way to the cold silence of the moon to catch up to it one last time.

In conclusion, First Man is not what you’d expect it to be, but it is all the better for it. I definitely recommend you spend your hard earned dollars to see it in the theatre (IMAX if possible). Director Damien Chazelle and star Ryan Gosling create a worthwhile and serious film of dramatic heft that turns the gigantic evolutionary moment of a human expedition to the moon into an intense and intimate evolutionary moment for a single man. When Neil Armstrong said it was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, he would’ve been more accurate to say that it was “one small step for mankind, and one giant leap for his humanity”.

©2018

La La Land : A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!!****

Estimated Reading Time : 5 minutes and 44 seconds

My Rating : 4 out of 5 stars.

My Recommendation : SEE IT. Take the time and effort and go see it in the theatre as it is a very enjoyable film.

La La Land, written and directed by Damien Chazelle, is the story of Sebastian, a struggling jazz musician and Mia, an aspiring actress, who meet and fall in love in Los Angeles. The film stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone with supporting turns by John Legend and Rosemary DeWitt.

La La Land is one of those movies that critics and layman alike will all undoubtedly describe as "charming and delightful". A big reason why they will describe it as "charming and delightful' is because it really is "charming and delightful". As cynical as I am, and goodness knows I am very cynical when it comes to Hollywood, La La Land with its vibrantly contagious spirit, was able to break through any resistance I had to it and will most likely breakthrough with other, less jaded viewers as well.

A major factor in La La Land's charm and delightfulness are the two leads. Both Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are incredibly likable actors and they are at their most agreeable as Sebastian and Mia. For as handsome as Gosling is, and he is impossibly handsome, he is somehow able to play a somewhat abrasive, jazz-purist oddball with a remarkably grounded appeal and subtle charisma. Emma Stone gives an enchantingly strong performance as Mia, the under-employed actress and barista. Stone is able to exude an inner vivacious luminosity that gives her an undeniable magnetism and presence on screen. The fact is, both of these actors are so enjoyable together and have such electric chemistry, that you could watch them banter, flirt and perform with each other for days on end. 

The script and the direction are very well done by Damien Chazelle, who proved with his last film, the critically-acclaimed Whiplash, that he is a formidable filmmaking talent. Once again Chazelle has music in general, and jazz in particular, at the center of his story. Chazelle is really gifted at visually portraying music and musicians in a genuine and realist way, which many filmmakers fail to accomplish. Chazelle's camera becomes just another instrument in the band and another partner in the dance, making the entire film not just a musical, but a piece of musical art, a piece of dance art and piece of cinematic art all at once. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren  paints the Los Angeles of La La Land with a lush and gorgeous palette, creating a vivid and intoxicating dreamscape.

The dance numbers in La La Land are pretty remarkable in that they are almost all done in one take, which is no small feat with such complicated blocking. The thing to realize as you watch La La Land's musical numbers is that Chazelle doesn't use a static camera, like they did in say the Oscar winning musical Chicago, so not only must the choreography of the dancers and performers be perfect, but the choreography of the camera must be integrated as well.

La La Land is a staggering technical accomplishment when you take the intricacies of the musical numbers and the filmmaking process into account. It is also a truly unique and original piece of work that manages to pay homage to the classic Hollywood musicals of yesteryear yet also reinvents that genre with a new, sort of everyman, millennial day-dreamer musical. 

La La Land works on many levels. It is a tribute to Hollywood's distant and not-so distant past (there is a hidden homage to Boogie Nights in it that only the most eagle-eyed will catch) and is also an examination of the life of an artist in a world of commercialism. In addition, the film is a testament to keeping the faith and staying the path in terms of one's artistic purity. Both Sebastian and Mia have to suffer the slings and arrows of the commercial life in order to gather the courage to return to their artistic roots to find fulfillment and happiness which in turn morphs into commercial success, in other words, the Hollywood circle of life. But, as any struggling actor or musician will testify, the battle for artistic purity is never as cut and dried as the artist wishes it were. For example, Sebastian is a jazz purist, but is a demand for jazz purity the reason jazz is dying? Chazelle asks this same type of question of his audience regarding cinema while paying homage to the old Astaire musicals that purists adore, but he presents that tribute in a new, less purist and more populist, package, which is pretty brilliant. 

La La Land is a layered film that can be enjoyed on many levels. You can watch and enjoy it as a pure rom-com, or a love story, or a musical, or an homage to Hollywood or a mediation on the artists struggle, or a combination of all of these. It is tough to watch La La Land and not be overcome by its unrelentingly joyous energy. I recommend you spend your hard earned money and sparse free time by going to see La La Land in the theaters, I think you will find it worth the time and effort.

La La Land will no doubt win a boatload of awards at this years Oscars because Hollywood loves nothing more than movies about itself. I know, I know, you are shocked to hear that Hollywood is so rapaciously narcissistic, it is like hearing that Wall Street is greedy or D.C. corrupt, it can be jarring to realize...but I promise you that it really is true. Besides Hollywood rewarding movies that are about Hollywood, it also loves musicals, even the dreadful ones like Chicago, which means a good one like La La Land is going to be sitting pretty come Oscar Sunday. I assume that Gosling, Stone, Chazelle and a cinematographer Linus Sandgren along with a plethora of behind-the-scenes artists will be nominated and most likely win Oscars as well as the film getting Best Picture. While I thoroughly enjoyed the film, my award voting preferences trend toward more existential and substantial material, so I wouldn't necessarily vote the same way as the Academy. That said, I also won't complain when Hollywood rewards La La Land. There is no sense in complaining here in Hollywood, for as Jake Gittes' partner Lawrence Walsh so eloquently taught me in the film Chinatown, "Forget it, Jake. Its Chinatown." So on Oscar night, as Martin Scorsese and Silence, and Terence Malick and Knight of Cups get overlooked, I'll just keep reminding myself..."Forget it, Mick. It's La La Land."

©2017