Like many of the Rose Scholars in the group, I had not seen La La Land yet. In fact, I am so behind on new movies, or really most movies, that I didn’t actually know anything about it other than a little bit of what happened at the Oscars and that it was a musical. I guess I never realized how many covers of its songs I’ve heard in other places, but the music was familiar, which may have actually worsened my experience watching it for the first time. Personally, I don’t really understand all of the praise it has received, but I also know my movie tastes tend to be misaligned from a lot of popular opinions.
From the hype that it’s gotten and the positive expectations going into the movie along with the fact that I enjoy musical movies, I didn’t enjoy this movie as much as I thought I would. Maybe if I saw if again it would grow on me, but it seemed a little too contrived and cheesy. I understand fading the background and having a spotlight on an emotional soloist in a theater production, but I was slightly annoyed every time it happened in this particular movie. Unlike a live production, there are so many more interesting things you can do with a scene and camera angles that aren’t zooming into a face with a dark background. I think with a clearly large budget and the fact that it is a movie could have resulted in some better cinematographic choices.
I don’t want to make this post into a rant about why I didn’t enjoy the movie, because that’s not really the case. I enjoyed the movie bits much more than the musical bits, which I think was my main issue. I understand casting big-name stars, but I wasn’t on board with all the artistic choices. The singing wasn’t as strong as I expected, especially coming in after watching fantastic renditions of the songs elsewhere. Perhaps the vocal tones the producers were going for were met, but I think was expecting a more musical-theater-sounding quality to the voices. Another thing that was distracting was arms. Or maybe just the dancing in general. While there were some great scenes where I thought they took good advantage of the fact that they were shooting a movie and not a stage production, it was pretty obvious who wasn’t trained as a dancer. In some ways, the movie even recognized this, like with the cheesy silhouettes in the observatory and the very boringly shot tap scene.
While I enjoyed the acting for the most part, I don’t really enjoy watching an established actor pretend to be a struggling actor who keeps auditioning and finally gets their chance. I get that this may have been their dream in the past, but at this point, if Emma Stone were less likeable, I would have been very irritated watching her bad auditions. Also, why was Ryan Gosling the only white person who liked jazz in the movie? There are definitely things that musicals can get away with, but I wasn’t enamored with the overall movie to overlook smaller parts.
Overall, the movie didn’t meet expectations, but I still had an enjoyable time watching it. There were definitely parts where I laughed and definitely appreciated some of the artistic choices made, but this I don’t think this is ever going to be a favorite movie musical for me. I think it tried to mix elements of movies and musicals in different ways, but not always cohesively. While I would definitely give it another shot and will probably watch it again sometime in the future, I can’t really pinpoint my current feelings on the production.