La La Land Review

Right off the bat, there was something that I loved about this film: a long dance number done in a single take.  I absolutely love it when films do complicated stuff like this in one take.  It's a dying art.  On the subject of cinematography, La La Land also had a painter's eye for lighting, and filled its scenes with the most wonderful colors.  So as it happens, I'm really rooting for this film to win Best Cinematography.

The other conspicuously obvious Academy Award that it's up for is Best Original Score, and this is the aspect of La La Land that I'll pay the most attention to, seeing as it's a musical, which makes it a special kind of film that's subject to a different kind of critique than the average film.  A musical is to be judged as a musical, and has different standards for quality than everything else you'll be seeing in theatres.  Yes, characters and story are important, but that's only a part of the whole.  It should be worth noting that I think that the characters and story for Oklahoma! are terrible, but it's still a good musical.

Yes, it does emulate a classical musical from the 40's and 50's, set in the modern era.  It has a familiar storyline about two performers who are trying to land their dream careers, which very much fits this genre.  The artistry in the editing does a lot to evoke these old films.  There's spontaneous dancing, including tap dancing, and people wearing flamboyantly colorful outfits that make me think of the old days when Technicolor was a huge gimmick that every director wanted to take advantage of.  All these things are wonderful.

However, at the same time I should note that La La Land focuses more on its characters than its music at times.  That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that since this is a musical, the characters should have expressed themselves through singing and dancing on a few more occasions than they ultimately did.  Near the end of the film, they didn't have as many dance routines, and ultimately, they didn't use as many songs as they could have.  There's an upside and a downside to this, and I'll get to the upside later.  The downside is that this movie doesn't take full advantage of its medium to express the stories and feelings of its characters.  It's a musical, but only part-time.  It isn't as immersed in its genre as Singin' in the Rain was back in the day.  There are times when it feels just like any other film that you might see, using the same contemporary storytelling techniques, albeit with much better cinematography.  I'm personally not sold on the balance in-between the musical portions of the film and the "normal" segments, although this got nominated for Best Editing, so it definitely warrants a second watching before I really make up my mind on that.

Let's look at the upside to this, though: because there are only about five or six original songs, they're much more memorable.  They actually reuse much of the music from some of these songs, a lot, so certain key songs really stick in your mind after leaving the theatre.  And it's not as if songs are the only things that make this a musical: there are several segments where there's just instruments playing, without any lyrics.  Because La La Land makes frequent use of not just its songs, but its score, I'm willing to believe that it will take home the Oscar in that category.

Two of my favorite pleasures in a film, when done right, are its cinematography and its score, and La La Land definitely did them right.  It was an experience for me.  Unfortunately, since my expectations were subconsciously very high, it let me down somewhat, but not too much.  It is indeed the favorite nominee for Best Picture that everyone has been talking about.