Anticipate LA LA LAND, the musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone

with J.K. Simmons as the crusty but benign NASA head

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, January 9, 2017 5:10 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"OK Armstrong, let's try this again. 3, 2, 1, blastoff."

[cuts off launch]

"Too high. Again, 3, 2, 1, blastoff."

[cuts off launch again]

"My altitude. Again, 3, 2, 1, blastoff."

[throws chair at Armstrong]

After watching Whiplash and reading about this I think I just find Chazelle's take on music & artistic pursuits pretty juvenile and distasteful.

I was a little bothered by the film's occasional insinuations that the Golden Age (*mimes jerk-off motion*) perfected things and we've since "lost our purity" re: the arts

Why? The movie is proof positive.

i'm not proud of it but for uninteresting personal reasons i wish ill on this filmmaker

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, 10 January 2017 04:35 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

be proud. the guy's obviously an artless menace

is this in it? a Green Velvet musical would be beautiful actually

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-NX3OFlKAE

for all the slightly dumb 'white people movie' stuff ive seen people say ('its not like real LA!', 'its trying to resurrect old white hollywood!'), i was surprised by how many non white people fill its scenes, one after the other.

the stupidest/funniest part of it might be john legends character sitting with gosling one minute, and giving him a slightly annoyed 'this is how it is' talk about modernising JAZZ, then the next thing we see, how this 'modern jazz' band has become, a bruno mars type group. the jump is almost too obvious. the jazz purist/kenny g convo was funny but almost TOO archetypal in terms of conversations most ppl have about jazz, but i give chazelle some credit for making two popular films in a row where jazz plays a key presence.

chazelle is a pretty rough around the edges director when it comes to narrative/character, hes not someone with a delicate touch, so i liked the balance in this between old hollywood musical unreality, and the rougher sort of alt-musical stuff weve seen in the last decade, though it didnt go quite far enough.

but i give chazelle some credit for making two popular films in a row where jazz plays a key presence.

Meanwhile, Don Cheadle had to partially crowdfund his Miles Davis biopic, and even then the studio wouldn't put up a cent unless a white character was written into it (the crux/cause of the awfulness of the story). And after all that, the studio didn't do shit to promote it.

It's understandable, though; Miles is no Buddy Rich.

i mean, obviously, that was dire (and casting ewan mcgregor, of all people), but still, i give ANYONE credit for making two popular films in 2016 where jazz is a key theme (and yes, even if the main character/jazz musician has to be a white dude... though why this surprises anyone, i dont know. in chazelle's favour however, the male lead in his first indie feature was a black actor, whether as a pre-emptive atonement for what he assumed he would have to do later, i dont know, but hey, it is there), even if don cheadle cant get his miles biopic made the way he deserves to get it made.

in 2036, i fully expect there to be a new version of la la land with the gosling character a white hip hop backpack nerd.

im going to see LLL again, though do wish it didnt have the obvious 'look! homage!' moments, glorious though they might be. i wish they just repurposed it all, and made it of the moment. but oh well, hopefully there will be other musicals to follow.

I do love that Mia's family literally surfaces only long enough to be cheap plot devices

I'm surprised more people aren't talking about how good the music is, tbh! How it skips over the last thirty years of megamusical history and instead successfully attempts to revive the classic style, how there are a scant six songs and they're all great.. beyond that I thought the movie was trash but I def was impressed with the composer

video: what does it owe to Scorsese's NYNY?

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/tale-two-musicals

xp I agree the music (except probably the first song) is surprisingly excellent, and it's a pity the staging isn't remotely in the same league

thus was cute the music was shit the jazz stuff was a joke but it was a love story and i loved them and it was funny

all in all actors in a musical arent as good as singers/dancers in a musical but the acting is better thats that

i think the music fuckin blows

two memorable songs, the rest rote

City of Stars is good

thus was cute the music was shit the jazz stuff was a joke but it was a love story and i loved them and it was funny

all in all actors in a musical arent as good as singers/dancers in a musical but the acting is better thats that

otm

i do not like city of stars its plodding and rg's voice sounds like a fat baby

yea his vocals are shit but it's a nice melody

I haven't seen this but Gosling's vocals on "City of Stars" sound like the dying HAL 9000 singing "Daisy."

Does ‘La La Land’ Get Jazz, or Exploit It?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/arts/music/la-la-land-damien-chazelle-jazz.html?_r=0

i dont think this article quite justifies the hate for la la land based on the premise that it tackles its biggish jazz question poorly. is JL's keith really that much of a 'threat'? i get that gosling doesnt like him, but yknow, wynton marsalis didnt care that much for what miles davis was doing half the time either. my main issue is that JL's band in the movie a) have a terrible song b) the terrible song isnt really jazz, not even by fusion standards, which renders the what-is-jazz tension in the movie more or less totally moot, and makes the frisson not so much frisson, as a gigantic gulf, making it far too easy for non jazz savvy ppl watching it to leave the cinema even less informed than those who partake in the usual 'isnt jazz kenny g? whats so bad about kenny g jazz?' conversations.

but i still dont find it 'offensive' per se. white purists like gosling are there in every black music genre. the films main flaw might not be making this phenom of the white black music purist explicit, but then, la la doesnt make much of any of the 'issues' that are in there.

Yeah, I really am getting tired of this criticism tbh considering jazz exists in La La Land as the fantasyland of a solipsistic obsessive. It's like asking if High Fidelity gets Brian Eno right

And also, it's not really that hard to imagine that some depressive, starving Thelonious Monk stan might just stay in his weird little lane instead of constantly running into Kamasi Washington and Thundercat at Amoeba like when the Red Hot Chili Peppers walked into Moe's Tavern

we want chilly willy!

whiney otm omg

ppl acting like this movie is called the history of jazz ffs

yeah. the movie was mediocre for other reasons

Enh, the music is amazing, you guys are insane. I'm not just talking about the songs, I mean the whole score, especially the ending fantasy sequence.. and I even liked-loved the songs, at least three of them I could still hum today after one viewing, and Emma Stone's audition song was REALLY good, idk

Me I'm allergic to all musicals since, like, West Side Story-- occasional Disney and Sondheim aside-- and this was the first time I thought "oh wow somebody is treating The American Musical as this anachronistic form that peaked some 70 years ago, instead of this grab-bag of opera/rock/Hair-Chorus Line-Chicago-Elton-Webber-Schönberg post-modernity that is insulting to everything and everyone". After years of hearing "oh you MUST see Billy Elliott/The Producers/Book Of Mormon/Hairspray/Kinky Boots/Wicked/Hamilton" and feeling nihilist and angry afterward and basically swearing off the genre entirely, I was really into this thing. But I'm like.. comparing it to other musicals. I'm comparing it to Les Miz and Cats and whatever

i feel like a lot of these but what-about-the-jazz complainers a) dont really know much about jazz (SORRY) b) just hate the film and need to pin their irrational hate onto something that makes them feel they have a genuine, worthwhile cause to explain their hate c) just want to dig their heels into the ground about something cos its such a big deal release right about now. ashley clark, who i usually find has tons of interesting stuff to say, seems to take umbrage with the idea of JL as being a 'threat' (is he? really? to what?) but i just see it as two people who love a genre but have v different views for it. like robert glasper for example vs kamasi washington (who is great, but im not 100% sure he is doing anything 'new', apart from introduce a lot of younger, non-jazz ppl to a certain strand of the music). this whole thing about chazelle/gosling supposedly depicting a model of jazz as ossified i think also is a problem as it almost suggests that 'traditional jazz' is actually dead, and that no young players have an interest in keeping it going.

like, if there were a million amazing jazz innovators taking the music in hitherto undiscovered directions in 2017, that the film was denying and ignoring, i could see the issue.

here you guys go

https://twitter.com/1000timesyes/status/825017398973562881

1000 times no!

saw this trailer when i went to see Arrival - a movie that really GOT the 4AD label in a big way - and thought it looked terrible. like one of those Baz things i avoid. but watching the trailer i figured it would win awards. mostly i am just really excited to see the final Resident Evil movie this weekend which i also saw a trailer for that night. talk about an underrated director! though his three musketeers steampunk movie sucked....

anyway, that trailer had MUST TO AVOID all over it. i wonder if ewan mcgregor gets sad that his roles go to younger people now. he must be used to it.

lol whiney

I disagree tho, the film really wants the audience to think that Seb is a misunderstood talent, the whole big conflict was about him "giving up on his dreams" or whatever, this a isn't High Fidelity-style "look and lol at the adult baby" movie

i disagree for sure. i def got the feeling they were dreamers whose ambitions outweighed their actual talents, which i think is telegraphed by the fact that Emma and Gosling are two actors who can't since like Idina Menzel or whoever

i do love that her movie break comes after staging a poorly received glorified Fringe Festival one woman show

wonder what robert townsend thought of her screentest with the lines 'no YOU be trippin jamal'

i expected more thinkpieces for that line then digging into the cultural appropriation well re: The Jazz Question

idina menzel is awful tbh

fgti thats interesting because i really do think we have a clear path to watch this and consider it a lol @ the adult baby story!

xp the thinkpiece for that line was lol dangerous minds reference i mean cmon

I do love the scene where Ryan is jamming w/ his new band and suddenly the electronic/"impure" sounds start up and he stops playing, paralyzed, as if he's seen a live gorilla

never seen DM so that passed me by haha

darragh i didn't want to fp you for the Idina Menzel dis but i feel like my daughter would never forgive me if i didn't

but im sure someone could get some thinkpiece mileage out of how la la land illustrates the problem with hollywood casting agents in 2017

the best routine in the whole film btw is ES dancing to I Ran

xxxpost well it was more that subgenre really, as after DM, a lot of similar movies came out afterwards riding the same wave

she sure lived in a nice place for being a barista

its fair nv i got a challop and its a price you own

she sounds bad and hits bad notes. its a thing.