La La Land (2016)

I loved every minute of this romantic original musical about two kids struggling to make it (their careers as an actress and a jazz pianist and their love for each other) in LA. Jack and Amy liked it, too. The opening production number, taking place during a freeway traffic jam with hundreds of singers and dancers, or so it seems, is alone worth the price of admission. The title is clever--La La Land is a derisive nickname for Los Angeles that many who inhabit that city have come to embrace.

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling (last blogged for Irrational Man and The Nice Guys, respectively) are terrific as Mia and Sebastian. Their singing is literally pitch perfect and I'm a harsh critic. I found videos of each singing as kids (Emma singing the Meredith Brooks song Bitch and Ryan in a Disney Channel boy band--he has a solo at about 1:30) just to prove this is no fluke. And they dance--oh, do they dance. Yeah, it's a little corny. If you don't like musicals, stay home.

Apparently the Oscar for Best Picture almost always goes to movies whose cast is nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Best Ensemble Award. This was not nominated (Oscar nominations will be announced on the 24th) because, despite the 200 or so players, the movie is all about Stone and Gosling, with small support from Rosemarie DeWitt (most recently in these pages for Men, Women & Children) as Sebastian's sister, J.K. Simmons (last blogged for The Accountant) as his boss, and John Legend as a jazz-rock fusion musician friend--Legend wrote and performs the song Start a Fire (he won an Oscar for his song in Selma, produced Southside with You and this one).

However, this movie has won eight Critics Choice Awards, including Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay (tied with Manchester by the Sea), and Score. See my list of awards and nominations sorted by title here.

Director/writer Damien Chazelle (co-wrote 10 Cloverfield Lane, directed and wrote the much acclaimed Whiplash) had been working with his Harvard classmate, composer Justin Hurwitz, on this project for many years. They couldn't get it off the ground so took time off to make Whiplash together. Good move. Here's a playlist of many of the songs from La La Land. While writing this, however, I'm listening to an instrumental playlist of Hurwitz's compositions and piano solos from the movie.

The look of the picture is lush with cinematography by Linus Sandgren (last shot The Hundred-Foot Journey) and swinging retro dancing dresses credited to costume designer Mary Zophres (Hail, Caesar!).

As a former Angeleno, I appreciated the fabulous locations, including Griffith Park observatory. Here's an article about the locations. And as a lover of jazz, I enjoyed Sebastian's preaching about improvisation early on.

More love from Rotten Tomatoes' critics, averaging 93%, and audiences, weighing in at 89. As I said,  if you don't like musicals, skip it. Everyone else, just show up, as we did on Christmas day, the eleventh year the three of us have gone to a movie before celebrating with family. Sufferers of MPMS-Motion Picture Motion Sickness, sit in the last row for occasional swinging camera moves.