‘S WONDERFUL! ‘S MARVELOUS! ‘S OKAY: Movie Review of La La Land by Howard Casner

For questions: hcasner@aol.com

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Warning: SPOILERS

rev-1La La Land, the new musical about aspiring Angelenos, opens on a wintry 84 degree day in stalled bumper to bumper traffic on an L.A. freeway.

So, of course, to pass the time, everyone begins to sing and dance. And it’s absolutely wonderful, a marvelous moment of agile bodies twisting and turning, on car roofs and cement barriers, as the camera glides around and amongst them, as if carried by a graceful wind.

The basic story revolves around aspiring actress Mia (spunky Emma Stone, if that’s not redundant) and aspiring jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling, perhaps the cinema’s best representative of metrosexuality), an artist so pure he refuses to join a music group because he wants to open his own club where he can play jazz the way he wants, not the way someone else wants him to.

They have trouble meeting cute, and once they do and romance blooms, they have trouble breaking up. Read the rest of this entry »