Films I Love To Hate - La La Land

 By Ephraim Belnap

Mm, I sure wish the script was as good as this meal. Also, why do we have giant blacklights all over our house?

I see why people liked it, ‘cause it’s very beautiful, and it’s got some wonderful numbers, and two great leads. But I mostly hate it. Gosh, I hate it. 

Mostly because it’s about the problems I’m at risk of facing as an artist and it ends up failing most of them in idiotic ways and then acting like it's meaningful. 

Seriously, every problem in this film is them being idiots. They're two young people who want to be successful in their creative fields, and then meet each other, but then the whole conflict is them lacking the basic communication skills to resolve a problem. Most creative types have these skills before they graduate college. You understand being an artist means the hours aren't certain, and sometimes you have to be gone. But the leads act like people who've never even heard of gigging or touring or shoots or ANY of the worklife realities you have to deal with! He starts touring, and then they argue that he's abandoning his dream or something??? He's making bank playing in a jazz fusion band, and his main dream are to A) play jazz, and B) start a club that'll require lots of money. It's EXACTLY in line with his dreams! 

Is this the face of someone not fulfilling their dreams?

Then he says some BS about how she must've liked him better when he was a loser, and they both just end the argument without a hint of follow-up or apologizing. Who taught them how to argue? Then we get a flashforward where it's revealed that they broke up and she married some other guy, but the big emotional finale is a flashback where they imagine how they could've ended up together?? Newsflash, if she hadn't married that guy you could've ended up together! But clearly she didn't care enough to actually do that! All this flashing back is is the kind of immature self-indulgence that makes parents cheat on their spouses! "Oh, if only this had happened ... " Yeah, but it DIDN'T. And it didn't happen for a reason! All you're doing by doing that is stringing someone along and hurting your spouse. Don't go there! 

A shot from the directors' previous film, where the leads who are supposed to be in college actually look it

Granted, I'll give this film a BIT of a pass, 'cause the original plan was to have them to be college-age kids who looked it, so their naïveté would've made a HECK of a lot more sense. But that's not what we got when we watched this! I'm not taking it away from anyone, but GOSH this film annoyed me, and rubbed me the wrong way. If you wanna see Ryan Gosling walking around LA at night with awesome lighting and a KILLER soundtrack, just watch Drive. If you wanna watch a film about the struggle of succeeding in Hollywood, watch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. If you want to watch an old-school film about a couple connecting and reconnecting in their Hollywood careers with songs and dances, watch The Artist. But La La Land is just gonna let you down and tick you off. Now you know.