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

the ending undermines the Hollywood comedy musical romance-ness of the film so it makes sense to ask to what end was it deployed against the more obvious happy ending. is it just bc at the last moment the filmmakers had a failure of nerves and thought audiences wouldn't buy something without a downer ending? i.e. too saccharine sweet if they end up together? very superficially they develop once or twice the theme of their work superseding their relationship (when he misses her play for the photo shoot, when he is going to have to tour and be away from her, and maybe something she did too tho even tho i saw the film last night i can't remember) but hardly enough to necessitate that ending or give it any resonance. honestly it seems a bit like they didn't have much to say beyond the look and the music and so put it in for some unearned gravitas the tragedy of love lost.

their work superseding their relationship ... hardly enough to necessitate that ending or give it any resonance

it was this, it was enough to give it resonance (for me) ymmv. it was a good ending imo

SPOILEr, but there's kinda the same ending in Chazelle's first film. He likes that whole theme of what artists has to sacrifice. This time it seemed as something only Hollywood would find tragic: They get everything, fame, money, jazz bars, spouses, kids, they just don't get each other. Boo hoo. The really stupid thing is that it's modeled on Umbrellas of Cherbourg, where the melancholy comes from the Algerian War interfering. Not exactly the same.

Have you seen the film, darragh?

― Frederik B, Sunday, 16 April 2017 00:08 (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yep

It was good.

Thought the ending worked

Other endings would also have worked.

Not sure it can bear too much weight tho tbph

ya Mordy + Fred both overthinking it. it came as a surprise, but was emotionally v effective

Liked this so much I had to pause it and make popcorn.

I felt the ending was saying something like you can't have cake and eat it but you can always love the idea of cake and feast on the memory whenever you experience hollywood magic (or jazz?).

The opening number is so stupendous that I wish they'd somehow managed to end the film there. But I suppose a smile passing each other on the freeway would have been a bit impersonal.

Finally, the lighting was like an exact cross between Wong Kar-wai and the original Star Trek series.

I checked the DVD out of the public library and my wife and I watched it last night. I see most ilxors were pretty tepid about this one and I agree. Gosling and Stone were barely able to dance or sing at an acceptable level, let alone rise to the sort of magnetism of Astaire and Rogers. Other than Gosling being handsome, there was zero reason why Stone would have been attracted to him in the first place; he was an asshole. The tired theme of "fulfilling your dreams" was so exhausted in this as to be moribund.

otoh, it gave employment to a lot of dancers in the big production numbers. The candy-colored costumes, set design and cinematography were sort of fun, in a Disney kind of way. But its use of music was blandly safe and colorless, and no human motions were harmed in the making of this movie, because they were touched so lightly one never even noticed them.

Gosling and Stone did what they could with weak material. The script was at the heart of all the problems and Damien Chazelle's superficiality was all over the script.

er, human eee-motions