Well, speaking as one white moviegoer whose opinion is statistically entirely negligible, I care. I don’t want individual movies to be “religiously vetted” for racial quotas, but it’s the aggregate effect that’s annoying me. I am getting damn tired of seeing so many mainstream movies that are still so white.
More and more, the people I see around me are a mix of obviously diverse races and ethnicities. And when I go to a movie and see nine out of ten speaking characters cast as white people (not to mention overwhelmingly white extras in background crowds), that pulls me out of the experience. I think “wtf, this is not set in a small midwestern town or on a prep-school crew team, what’s with having almost nobody but white people here?”
Such lazy white-default casting is getting to look less and less realistic, and consequently more and more tired. And as a result I’m getting more and more tired of seeing it over and over.
I spoke today to an older guy who’d seen it with his wife and he said that they both thought it was not good. He said that the dancing on Come Dancing was far better. He noted that the actress had learned to dance for the film and that the actor had learned to play the piano for the film and that both had just learned was very evident.
I just couldn’t care less. I’m going to a movie to have a good time and forget about the wider world for a little while, not get my undies in a twist about the racial diversity of a movie’s cast.
And really… La La Land had like 15 actual characters anyway, and not all of them were white, just the two leads. ISTR that one of her roommates was hispanic, the jazz guys were black and most of the guys in John Legend’s band (can’t remember the name) were black. It’s not like the movie was that lily white really.
Lucky you. There are a whole bunch of things that I can be cheerfully oblivious to in movies, like all sorts of cinematographic effects or how the background music fits in, but some things I find just unignorable. Like whether the dialogue in historical films uses modern anachronisms, or whether characters who are supposed to be struggling young urbanites live in huge comfortable apartments, or whether supposedly middle-class female characters are shown in like seventeen different elegant outfits over what’s alleged to be a four-week time interval, or whether the cast is unrealistically disproportionately white.
All that shit’s just lazy, you know? It just seems like it would have been so easy to fix such issues so they wouldn’t grate on viewers who happened to notice them, but whoever was handling them apparently didn’t even care about plausibility.
I just posted a few comments on Facebook comparing the far superior numbers from the Coens to what Chazelle tries to do and (to these eyes) fails. It helps that Channing Tatum can dance and the choreography is playful with the boisterous energy believable.
For me, dancing is not just a physical act honed through practice, like any number of sporting activities (catching a ball, running an obstacle course, etc.). Both require dexterity, athleticism and an excellent sense of timing.
But in musicals, dancing is often another form of acting–especially the kind of dancing that’s being attempted in LA LA LAND. Our suspension of disbelief that two people would just up-and-boogie to an invisible orchestra should be violated, but a good dancer will demonstrate that the dance is a way of manifesting that character’s state of mind. Even though it’s meticulously choreographed, a good dance will feel organic, spontaneous, and a natural extension of what that character is feeling. It’s by necessity dramatic.
Novice dancers can rarely achieve that, melding the physical with the emotional with that level of precision. It takes enormous amount of training, which is why I compared it to Dancing with the Stars (since I know the LLL choreographer does a lot of work on those competition TV shows). It always felt that Gosling & Stone were doing a routine, hitting their marks, counting the paces. It never felt loose or limber or real. Musicals are so heavily stylized that it raises the bar to feel that these two people are communicating and connecting through this unlikely physical act. And never once did I feel that between them. They were just doing their best. But a film like this needs so much more than just B-minus-for-Effort.
“Charm”? Like the charm of watching your 1st grader in a chorus? Great for the parents - hell on earth for strangers. I’m glad someone said that Stone/Gosling can’t really sing - that just saved me the cost of two tickets. I find 0 charm in people who cannot sing but try anyway.
Loved that scene! LOVED it. Saw both movies with my girlfriend (Caesar and La La), and I actually compared La La’s numbers unfavorably with the Caesar number, saying, “That’s how you really do it.”
Hail Caesar didn’t really work as a story but it had some lovely parts. La La had neither.
Yes, and the Dames number is a brilliant sendup of cheesy 40s musical numbers that basically outdoes the originals. It’s worth the price of admission, really. Nothing in LLL is worth 1/20 that number.
Also, re Ryan’s supposed playing of the piano… As a mediocre piano player myself, my impression was that he was doing the fingerings in the movie but not playing the actual notes. Nor, would I guess that the recordings on the soundtrack were of his playing. Unless he became genuinely first-class player for the movie, for that’s professional playing we hear. That said, I’m still impressed he could imitate the playing on screen as well as he could.
I really wanted to like LaLa Land because Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are likeable, and I love a romantic musical. I didn’t actively hate it but I hate the fact that it will probably get Best Picture because it’s about Hollywood. Their voices were weak and particularly so when part of a larger number when the backup folks are belting it out. The chemistry wasn’t there and it was kind of a mess.
I don’t know that I’ll see Rogue One since I haven’t been keeping up with Star Wars (and also I’m not sure I’m allowed to) but from what I’ve heard it’s got to be better than LLL.
It’s still not entirely clear to me. A lot (most?) of the time, the piano sound did not sound “live”–it sounded pre-recorded. Grabbing the sound of an upright from a live mic on the set would have sounded totally different that what we actually heard. But, I wasn’t there…
He could also have been fingering what he had played earlier, of course.
It’s a very good popcorn action blockbuster. But one of the flaws, as I saw it, is that they spent more time on character development for ancillary characters, and less on the main ones. I mean, at the end of the movie, we knew more about what made Saw Gerrera, Galen Erso and Orson Krennic tick than we did about Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso. Hell, K-2S0 was scarcely less developed as Andor, and his backstory was that he was reprogrammed by the Rebellion.
All that said, it’s an extremely entertaining movie, and it does dovetail into Episode 4: A New Hope well, although it’s clearly a ret-con, as had there always been a huge fleet action at Scarif as shown in the movie, there would have been references to it throughout ANH, ESB and ROTJ, for one reason or another- why there were so few fighters to attack the Death Star, tactical changes at Endor due to experience at Scarif, etc…
Are you kidding? The soundtrack was great. Certain songs get stuck in your head. And I’ve always been ambivalent about Emma Stone but she was lovely in this.
Rogue One - and Star Wars in general - was a dreck.
“Even by old school musical standards”? What are all these great new school musicals?
Staring? I didn’t notice any staring. Were you watching the same movie?
And this is Emma Stone’s best role and performance since Easy A. Like easily.
I liked both movies a lot. I don’t see why you have to pick one or the other. I liken it to enjoying a nice Chinese food dish and also liking an Italian dish. Why can’t you just like both? Or neither or whatever?
But for “La La Land” in particular, it fulfilled the one thing that I ask of ALL movies: it entertained me. I enjoyed it. Sure, it may have been fluffy, but one can enjoy a nice meringue pie once in a while and not have to live off organically-grown kale salad. (what’s with all my food metaphors?)
It didn’t have to be deep, it didn’t have to be mind-blowing. It just had to be an enjoyable couple of hours. And it fulfilled that for me greatly. I liked the songs and the dance routines. I thought it was a fun movie. It was pure escapist fare. And it did it well.