The Latest
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: WORLD OF TOMORROW DIR. DON HERTZFELDT (2015) – SHORT FILM
Why you should add this short film to your Netflix queue At This Very Minute:
- on Netflix
- only fifteen minutes long
- makes efficient use of its fifteen minutes
- lots of colorful visual stimuli
- one of the character’s entire speaking role is taken directly from a recording of the director’s four-year-old niece drawing and playing in her natural environment
- jarringly, matter-of-factly existentialist
Rated: 9/10
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: PASSENGERS DIR. MORTEN TYLDUM (2016)
I knew exactly what I was getting myself into when I pressed play, but wow. I don’t think a movie has ever offended the entire human race, all of us at once, like Passengers has.
Here’s how I watched Passengers. I started it, rolled my eyes for forty minutes straight, paused it, got up to go to the bathroom, and when I returned, could not muster a single ounce of willpower to continue it. It’s just so bad.
Passengers is marketed as a science fiction film. But just because it takes place in space does not make it science fiction. Repeat after me: JUST BECAUSE IT TAKES PLACE IN SPACE DOES NOT MAKE IT SCIENCE FICTION.
Passengers is a movie for people who like to fetishize geek culture but don’t like actual science fiction. It belongs to the subgenre of nondescript movies that waters down niche tastes so that they’re palatable (bland) enough for mainstream audiences. It’s like bougie suburban mom-ified ethnic food. You don’t have to pretend to eat it if you don’t actually like it. There’s so much other food available to you. Nobody is challenging your worldliness, but if they are, it’s better than you colonizing an entire genre for the sake of appearances.
I hope people don’t read me wrong. I respect geek culture, respectfully, I hope. I myself am not the biggest fan of science fiction. But if I were to get into it, I highly doubt having two young, attractive, able-bodied, and heterosexual household names playing the leads would do me in. Honestly, Jennifer Lawrence? She was fantastic in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, but let’s just leave it at that. I’m tired of pretending she’s this generation’s Heroine. Beyond that, her and Chris Pratt have questionable chemistry. It feels a bit like Tyldum plucked any two higher-ups from a “most famous” list and smashed them together, banking on their combined sheer marketabilities to make up for obviously lacking compatibility.
I’m also just…so mad about that $110 million budget. You can’t see these soaring panoramas of the starship’s interior, all glass and chrome and clean white lighting, and not feel the producers aggressively flexing right in front of you. See the bit about fetishizing geek culture above. I demand that all box office earnings be rerouted to NASA or SpaceX, thank you, good bye.
That said, the premise of Passengers does have sincere merit. A starship making a routine 120-year journey from Earth to another colony planet carries five thousand hibernating passengers to populate it aboard. Among them is a mechanical engineer Jim (Pratt) who, for inexplicable reasons, is awakened ninety years early. There’s a wellspring of avenues of moral conflict that one can follow from this, one of the hallmarks of great science fiction. The movie surprisingly (and pleasantly) spends some time tracing one such avenue, flirting with the morality of Jim manually reviving Aurora (Lawrence) for companionship after having essentially social media-stalked her for the previous year. In taking that risk, with eighty-nine years still left, he submits her to living out the rest of her life and dying on the ship long before it reaches its final destination. This has the potential to touch on themes like autonomy, playing God, or suffering if we’d let it. I wouldn’t be opposed to an alternative make of Passengers where we scrap the romance altogether and explore some of the themes I just mentioned.
Of course, I’ve seen less than half of the movie, so how accurately can my review represent it? Consider this a review of the first forty minutes, then. If anything, I’m thankful to you, Passengers, for letting me vent all of anger toward bad movies through you. My advice for potential viewers: purchase a DVD copy from your local Target, take it into the back alley, and have at it.
Rated: 0/10
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: THE NICE GUYS DIR. SHANE BLACK (2016)
I wish I had written this review right after seeing this, not three months after, because I don’t remember very much of what I thought. Maybe I didn’t think anything at all! If you appreciate Ryan Gosling or a ‘70s Los Angeles in which the porn industry is just as profitable as the auto industry or else just being entertained for 2 hours, this movie is for you. I would advise you not to bestow great expectations on The Nice Guys, but – why does a movie have to be the Greatest Of All Time to be veritably good? I sincerely enjoyed and don’t regret handing over my money. Go see this.
Rated: 6/10
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: DRIVE DIR. NICOLAS REFN (2011)
If 2017 is the Year of Discovering How Much I Hate Woody Allen, it’s also the Year of Discovering How Much I Love Ryan Gosling. As always, I’m a latecomer to this bandwagon, but the important thing is that I’m here, right?
I’m a firm believer that, unlike for most actors, the enduring excitement surrounding Ryan Gosling is well-deserved, and that his famous works are good, but his lesser known works are even better. Will a complete Ryan Gosling filmography be the film challenge of the year? Stay tuned.
Let’s talk about Drive. The unnamed getaway driver (Gosling) who the film centers around is coolly and completely without past or future. We don’t learn any more than what each of his moonlighting clients learn in the half-hour they spend in his backseat, just that he works alone and that he’s really fucking good at what he does. The remainder of the film reveals no personal history or identifying details. His face is always unreadable, devoid of emotion, any whiff of his motivations untraceable. Even his behavior auto-adjusts every moment. The only constant is his unpredictability. He just is.
This anonymity underscores an interesting proposition about how well we can know anyone, really. As a casual observer, we’d never receive more than a glimpse. If we happen to be in the next car over at a stoplight, while he’s out on a job, all we see is perhaps a flash of blond hair tucked within a nondescript car, and then he’s gone. We will never know who he is, was, or will be. Nor do we even care.
Even then, your relationship with the Driver can be as intimate as Carey Mulligan’s Irene’s – a single mother living on the same floor – and still come no closer to encroaching upon his privacies. For the sake of the film, we have to believe that he has none. Classical Greek wisdom postulates that to truly love someone is to know them. In our case, we have to trust Gosling without knowing him, which is the ultimate leap of faith.
Drive evokes the shroud of old Hollywood noir to tap into the tall, dark, and mysterious trope we already know how to be devastated by. It takes its contemporaries and strips away the bullshit until nothing’s left but bare functionality, leaning on the weathered but rarely exploited philosophy that some of the most effective works need say very little to be felt most intensely. Modern-day Hollywood’s flashy car chases and CGI explosions hold a fruity, paper-umbrella’d island cocktail to Drive’s smooth scotch.
Rated: 9/10
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE DIR. GLENN FICARRA (2011)
I have to confess: the first movie I’d ever seen with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as the romantic leads was La La Land. There is a proper order for the two: Crazy, Stupid, Love has to be watched first, and only then can the Gosling-Stone pairing evolve into the less juvenile La La Land. I’ll try to not compare the two relationships, but feel free to call me out if I slip up.
I know that I’m very late on the CSL train but that may be a blessing in disguise – I don’t really know what the public reaction to this was when it came out six years ago, so you know what I say below is genuine.
Crazy, Stupid, Love is your classic feel-good flick that’s more tolerable than most. I’m not going to act like it’s some spark of brilliance, because it’s not. The way that all of the main characters are tied together at the end was clever. By no means necessary, but enjoyable all the same. Carell: far more believable than his The Office role. Gosling: not his best performance, but even with the hype fogging up the windshield around him, you’ve got to hand it to him. It takes a special actor to play into all the shirtless, ripped-abs clichés and get away with it. Stone: what is it about her low and raspy voice that gets all of our panties in a bunch? I need to see more of her works, for science. The babysitter: she’s a piece of work, alright.
Even if you get nothing out of this, indulge yourself in two of the greatest minutes of the film:
Rated: 5/10
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: THE LOBSTER DIR. YORGOS LANTHIMOS (2015)
Who The Lobster is not for: everyone
Who The Lobster is for: black-humorists
Like the very best of satire, The Lobster is close enough to reality to disrupt household comfort. The premise Lanthimos proposes is: being single is the ultimate crime. Loose-end adults are relocated to a government facility impersonating a hotel. There, the “guests” have 45 days to select a life partner or else be turned into any animal of their choice and released into the woods. Most people elect to become dogs or horses; David, in a spot-on performance given by a mustached, dad-bodded, and beaten-down Colin Farrell, selects a lobster, citing the animal’s cold-bloodedness and hard exoskeletons, steadfast in his anomalous choice despite the hotel manager’s skepticism. As we’re all familiar with from the ubiquitous Friends reference, lobsters mate for life. Whether this omission of knowledge is by David’s genuine ignorance of lobster sociology or else by his unwillingness to admit his desire of a life-mate is unclear.
While watching this, although it practices a wildly different approach, one can’t help but be reminded of 1984. Both recall a faith in social Darwinism, or “survival of the fittest,” in which love (interpersonal vs. patriotic) is used as the primary vehicle to strengthen and homogenize society – systematic, government-mandated love, to be clear. “Love” in The Lobster is nothing but a misnomer for “playing by the rules,” as any actual feelings of love is counterproductive to a successful pairing. This society draws a definitive line in the sand between man and beast, but what distinction truly exists if not the capacity for emotion?
Something I’m borrowing from Roger Ebert’s review: “‘The Lobster’ is narrated in a monotone by Rachel Weisz, who doesn’t enter the film until some way in. The tone of the narration is key: It is as though Weisz is reading a love poem in botched translation by a third grader. She sounds like a child trying to talk the way she thinks adults talk.”
I think I have a thing for Movies Who Refuse to Name People. Apart from David, the cast of characters features Lisping Man, Limping Man, Heartless Woman, and Short Sighted Woman. I think I also have a thing for Movies That Take Place in Unspecified, Gray-Sodden, Seacoast Locations. Expect new additions to my themed lists soon.
Rated: 9/10
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN DIR. KELLY FREMON CRAIG (2016)
Things I don’t like in movies: clichéd growing pains (written by adults whose memory of adolescence has clearly expired), boringly linear story arcs, unmemorable one-liners written in for the sake of cheap laughter, and life lessons/happy endings neatly packaged and delivered in the final ten minutes.
You can file Edge of Seventeen under that list, with a bright pink post-it on it that reads, “Somehow makes it work.”
I liked this movie, a lot. It doesn’t chart any radical new territory, but it made an effort to do something new with the tired adolescent rom-com tropes passed on to it by its predecessors and contemporaries, and sometimes that’s more than enough. Another instance of how not every movie has to be the Lewis and Clark of its genre to be satisfying and profound.
Reworked adolescent rom-com trope #1: the protagonist is likable but somehow gravely misunderstood by his/her peers.
The film is upfront about this from the get-go: Nadine is not personable. She’s not even necessarily likable. Most of the time, she’s narcissistic and selfish and angsty and melodramatic and has dug her heels into her own world. And it’s refreshing. It’s so easy to like a pleasant protagonist that any movie that sets one up is almost guaranteed to be boring. It’s the flawed, self-contradictory characters who feel real. We root for Nadine despite her personal limitations because there are moments where we see kernels of her innate goodness and vulnerability shine through. We are reminded of our own teenage years, when everything mattered So Much, and every emotion was the most vivid saturation of its current hue, and each day was spent striking the ultimate balance between self-loathing and self-superiority.
Reworked adolescent rom-com trope #2: the protagonist pursues the ‘wrong’ guy for almost the entirety of the film, only to realize at the very end that the ‘right’ guy was in front of her all along.
Okay, Edge of Seventeen did fall into this trap. On the one hand, I caught myself shaking my head in the reflection of my computer screen every time Nadine melted over that stale end piece of juvie white bread. On the other hand, I get it. I know rationality doesn’t always fit into the equation of “liking” someone, especially when you’re new to relationships and have never needed to set standards for yourself or for your potential romantic candidates.
What earned Craig major brownie points in my book was the quietly earth-shattering casting of an Asian romantic lead. An Asian, as in, a racial minority usually relegated to some unimaginative stereotypic supporting role only written in for the sake of some diversity requirement. Specifically, an Asian male, the prototype most consistently degraded in consideration of attractiveness and desirability. Korean-born Erwin, played by the much-too-suave Hayden Szeto, is your stock boy-next-door in every other sense of the traditional conception, except for the fact of his race. It’s 2017, people.
Reworked adolescent rom-com trope #3: the movie has to be driven by plot, and those plot spikes are almost always kooky, cringe-worthy big events, like a school dance, punctuated with stale one-liners.
There might not be anything that disqualifies a movie from my high praises faster than utter dependency on plot. Give me some good character development to work with! Not only did this movie not allow its plot to steer it, it revealed and reveled in the messiness of adolescence in those everyday moments.
Final notes:
- Szeto is 31 years old. I know filmmakers like to age up when casting high school students, but this is just ridiculous.
- Krista’s loyalty to Nadine is so underrated by the latter. I suppose this is something you pick up on only when you yourself graduate from your teenage years.
- Possibly my favorite line: “[When I first met Krista,] she was dressed like a small elderly gentleman.”
- Whose willy wonka idea was it to not incorporate Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” somewhere in the movie? Because that would’ve tied in so nicely
Rated: 7/10
Sometimes (but more accurately most of the time), when I feel as though I’m not making progress or slipping behind, I have to tone down the dramatic reaction and remind myself of the reality of my situation. Example of an inciting incident: yesterday I completed an extra credit assignment in its entirety but forgot to submit it by the midnight due date.
Yeah, that sucks. I threw a mini hissy fit at myself for a minute. But then, I thought of it like this: why did I just blank? Why have I been so forgetful these past few weeks?
The root cause of that is that I’m taking four classes on the quarter system, I’m working and involved in a couple of extracurriculars, AND I’ve already started my internship. Between the necessities or eating, basic hygiene, and working out, that leaves me sleeping 4-5 hours a night and waking up already strung out. And it’s not only results in me being forgetful; it’s me being unable to concentrate on work, letting my grades slip, crying in the middle of a professor’s office hour, snapping at people without warrant – apply, rinse, repeat.
I halted mid-hissy fit. This lifestyle is clearly not sustainable. I asked myself the important question: how can I delegate my time better, most importantly prioritizing sleep?
I often feel like a bad Buddhist. I don’t pray, I don’t fast, and I don’t meditate nearly as often as my father. Truthfully, I don’t understand very much about the intricacies of the religion. But I do know why I personally am Buddhist – to practice recognizing objective truth and reality in order to achieve happiness and peace. Whenever I catch myself mid-emotional outburst and am able to talk myself through the situation, I consider it a personal victory. When I was younger and more absorbed in myself, I would never have been able to just stop feeling and start reasoning.
Me forgetting to submit the assignment is a good reminder for myself that I can’t just get by on the bare minimum of self-care. I’ve worked hard to cultivate the virtue of self-control I take such pride in, and it doesn’t sit with me to just easily let it become buried under my perceptions of being overwhelmed.
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: ANNIE HALL DIR. WOODY ALLEN (1977)
Until this one, the only Woody Allen works I’ve seen have been more recent (Midnight in Paris, the first ten minutes of Café Society). I’ve heard that Allen briefly departed from his usual themes for a period from 2005′s Match Point until right before Café Society. This must be why Midnight in Paris, which came out in 2011, was fun and harmless. I liked it when I first saw it. Frankly, though, I wasn’t too impressed. And I was especially unimpressed with what I’ve seen of Café Society (you can find my review here). And now that I’ve finally seen one of his original works hailing from the ‘70s (to which Café Society bears no remarkable originality beyond), I can conclusively say that one Woody Allen film is more than enough.
I briefly sifted through the search results of some of his other films, including the synopsis to the unbearable-to-watch, aforementioned Café Society. From these it seems to me like Allen is really keen on poking at the same veins and recycling the same stock characters for long beyond their life expectancies. The cinema universe does not need any more “unconventionally” beautiful (and always white), quirky, kind of distant girls with gaping character flaws; nor does it need any more self-important, condescending intellectual males who read Bukowski once and have now taken it upon themselves to fill the gaps in their female counterparts’ lives with emotional neediness masquerading as love.
What’s worse is that Allen seems to construe this sort of relationship to be, somehow, romantic. His entire reputation as a filmmaker is built around that. And if you know anything about the issue in his personal life about Mia Farrow and Soon-Yi Previn, you can make a fair assumption that Allen himself has a very perverted grasp on the notion of love. In the end, who he is as a person – which he is so upfront about – makes me far less interested in him as an artist.
Here is my review about Annie Hall, specifically:
My diatribe about Allen that prefaced this review still holds true for this movie, but just to a lesser degree. I enjoyed Annie Hall. It’s chock-full of dry, scraping humor. It meanders, but purposefully, focusing in and out of different scenes from Annie and Alvy’s relationship in no particular order, as one’s memory would be liable to do. And as I am of the firm belief that just as you can fall in love, you can easily fall out of it, I respect that this film has elected to mirror reality over a similarly, otherwise-unmemorable, love-centric movie. Annie Hall is not too ambitious; it doesn’t set itself up to be too much. For these reasons, it feels unpretentious and unapologetically truthful. But: I’m treating it as a standalone film here.
When you get to your second or third Woody Allen movie, the overworked and unimaginative tropes become glaring. Alvy Singer is a difficult character to make your mind up about; in the next Allen movie, however, you recognize Singer in whatever male protagonist and withhold your empathy from him almost immediately. It’s like Allen flat-out plagiarizes someone else’s work and makes the bare minimum amount of minor alterations for him to pawn off as quasi-original. The only thing is, he’s plagiarizing himself. On top of that, MPDG-ing (manic pixie dream girl-ing) and mansplaining are tired to even begin with.
One thing I don’t understand: Annie dresses herself in menswear – I want to interpret this as her wanting to be her own “man”/the “man” in the relationship. But Annie is so insecure throughout the movie – she’s constantly seeking validation from her boyfriend; maybe she just doesn’t know how to represent herself? Only at the end, after the couple had long since broken up and Annie had moved to LA is she seen in a white sundress, looking far more at peace with herself. Perhaps the necktie and oversized trousers is to suggest that she feels confined by Alvy’s opinions/perceptions of her?
(This review will be my one lengthy harangue about Allen. If I ever see another one of his works – which I’m not planning on – I will only focus on the movie itself.)
Rated: 8/10
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: CAFÉ SOCIETY DIR. WOODY ALLEN (2016)
I feel like 2017 is the year I’ve really discovered how much I hate Woody Allen. I’m saving that tirade for a later review though. With Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart in the mix (both who elicit a similar feeling for me as Allen does), I have no idea why I even attempted to watch this. Three minutes in and I’ve already rolled my eyes all the way to the back of my skull.
Rated: 0/10
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE DIR. TAIKA WAITITI (2016)
I know this movie received stratospheric reviews from critics, but honestly… Hunt for the Wilderpeople felt like a reincarnated (and far less outstanding) Moonrise Kingdom to me. Even from just hearing the name and seeing this movie poster, I had previously assumed this to be a Wes Anderson conception. Maybe I’m not the right audience for it, or maybe I didn’t “get” it (whatever that means), but I did not find this to be “infectious,” “pure genius,” or “comic dynamite.” If anyone else does, please explain it to me.
Rated: 1/10
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD BY J. K. ROWLING, JACK THORNE, AND JOHN TIFFANY (2016)
If you want to see a full rant about post-original series Harry Potter wizarding world direction, visit my review of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Here is an abbreviated rant, specific to Cursed Child:
I finished the screenplay in a total of approximately four hours, which is not to say it was so good I devoured it. Essentially, Rowling is trying to pawn off a half-assed fan fiction as an acceptable continuation of the main series. Also, screenplay format? Is she just trying to cop out of giving us her full, undivided efforts? I get that someone wanted to make a play out of it and from that the screenplay sprung, but it should’ve started off as a full book and been pared down, not the other way around. Again, disappointed in Rowling for failing to realize her original audience has grown up. If she’s going to write anything at all, let it be something with far greater emotional and intellectual depth.
Rated: 1/10
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM DIR. DAVID YATES (2016)
I only watched Fantastic Beasts out of a sense of loyalty perpetuating from my youth when I lived and breathed the Harry Potter world and not for any present-day excitement for the movie itself. I left the theater thinking, that was it? – but fans of FBWTFT, hear me out.
The original series gave us seven books worth of dimensional setup – everything we could possibly need to know from the architecture of the wizarding world to the personal history of our beloved cast with plenty of attention to the topics of second-tier importance in between. It had the luxury of feeding us information bite by bite, whereas Fantastic Beasts was much more akin to shoving a whole plateful down our throat. This is not necessarily FB’s fault; it’s almost a given that anyone who goes to see this movie is already familiar with the name (for those who aren’t: it’s mentioned as one of the required school readings for Harry and his classmates numerous times throughout the books). In my opinion though, the plot of this movie would have been much better suited for the second installment, which thank goodness we’re getting (along with a third, fourth, and fifth installment as well).
Here’s what I’m saying: too much time has passed since Deathly Hallows (the book came out nearly a decade ago and part 2 of the movie adaption was six years ago). A spin-off such as this one cannot be treated as “picking up where we left off.” Fantastic Beasts is a movie made for people who are already (and still!) familiar with the original franchise, and thoroughly so, since only a deeply invested fan can be expected to remember Newt Scamander’s and Gellert Grindewald’s precise contexts. As counterintuitive as it is to the effort of attracting non-fan viewers, if the writers really did aim to target previous Harry Potter fans, I think the first movie of this series should have been spent fleshing out the main characters as well as the overall American wizarding milieu, since even original fans are limited in their exposure to it. For example: the movie was constantly throwing new rules at us, as if expecting us to have prior knowledge of the way MACUSA works. (Actually, no, I think this alternative approach would more tactically intrigue non-fans and better equip them with the contextual basis to build off of come Fantastic Beasts 2.) On top of that, each of the main characters felt very two-dimensional, very simplistic. They all lacked the substance that allows a righteous (but undeniably black-and-white) hero for children to transcend into a believable protagonist with real human limitations and nuances for adults.
I’m not saying Fantastic Beasts was catastrophically done. If I had been five or so years younger I would have been enchanted by all of it, the score and the special effects and the unrealistic bravery and virtuosity embodied by our four heroes. But the fact of the matter is that Rowling’s original audience has grown up since the Sorcerer’s Stone (this is also the basis of much of my critique of Cursed Child, illuminating a common thread post-original series). We as a faithful audience deserve more than a straightforward plot and predictable motives, one whose high bar has been compromised because the creators are banking on original fans’ loyalty. Will I go see the sequel? Maybe. But if I’m not impressed by that one, I definitely won’t be paying money for Fantastic Beasts 3-5. My advice for the creators (for the next time they approach the brink of screwing up a spin-off): give us a first movie with less action and more exploration of the universe’s boundaries. That way, you’ll hook an audience who’s committed to the entire American wizarding world and all of its subtle machinations, not just an audience who’ll shell out for a ticket just to be cheaply entertained for a couple of hours.
Rated: 4/10
SYMPOSI-UM REVIEWS: LA LA LAND DIR. DAMIEN CHAZELLE (2016)
Here is the review I wrote up within an hour of having just seen La La Land:
There was a sizable length of time in my life during which I could not imagine that someone could create an enchanting film to rival Her and Grand Budapest Hotel. A strong and unfettered storyline! Purposeful pacing! Divine manipulation of color and other visual elements! Unapologetic emotional authenticity! The skillful suggestion of so much which never needed to be explicitly stated! BELIEVE EVERY GOOD THING YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT LA LA LAND. A cinematic masterpiece, stunning music, wholesome and colored and visceral and lush and shimmering and full of magic and light, a continuous flow of tears (of joy!), everything I could have ever asked of a work of art and more. I’m electrified by the prospect that there are others out there who genuinely believe life’s potential crests at such unbelievable heights, that there doesn’t always have to be that trademark Happy Ending for a bona fide happy ending, that you can live your own life selfishly while still letting other people affect you deeply, that success is in actuality an abstract concept brewing infinitely many manifestations of fulfillment. And don’t even get me started on the soundtrack. If you love life, go see it. Even if you don’t, go see it.
Here are the additional remarks I have accumulated in the two months since seeing La La Land, after my initial excitement has settled to a simmer and I’d had the chance to speak with people who are much less enthusiastic about it:
First of all, my original review was partly just an excuse to throw handfuls of flashy adjectives at the reader, like some sort of linguistic confetti bomb. I acknowledge that, but I don’t apologize for it. Moving on.
A week ago, La La Land gracefully relinquished their Best Picture accolade at the Oscars to Moonlight. As much as I love the former, I applaud the Academy’s decision wholeheartedly. La La Land, as beautiful and artful as it is, narrates a tension that for some people would be considered a luxury. The storyline laid out in La La Land is very much a (for lack of a better term) privileged white people problem. First of all, you have the attractive Gosling and Stone as your leads, each coming into this production with unmatchable name recognition and traction. Stone’s character Mia, a supposed struggling actress, drives a Prius. How does she even own a car in LA? Why hasn’t the owner of that Warner Bros. coffeeshop fired her already, since it she never shows up for work anyway? And somehow, she is able to get into all of these seemingly-exclusive Hollywood parties, outfitted in suspiciously nice dresses. (I suspect her eyebrows and enchantingly raspy voice have something to do with all of it.) As for Gosling’s Seb, he gets to be an unyielding purist about jazz because he can afford to be. Not to play the condescending realist card, but everyone has to make sacrifices here and there. It doesn’t make you a sell-out. It makes you willing to compromise to achieve your end goals. Welcome to the real world, don’t forget to pay your taxes.
And it’s hard not to be bothered by all of the talented people of color (I’m looking at you, Girl #1 in the yellow dress in the opening musical number) relegated to supporting roles, roles so insignificant they weren’t even bothered to be named. I’m sure if the male and/or female leads were given non-normative identities, a whole additional slew of complications would have to be thrown into the mix. Of course, it’s not the fault of these characters or really any white person in general for the cards (better or worse) they’re dealt with. I can’t help admit that I’m a bit disappointed by the lack of diversity though, especially when the opportunity so plainly presented itself in front of Chazelle.
Of course, I thought Gosling and Stone did a phenomenal job with their respective roles. But ultimately, the movie transcended the sum of its parts, which is just the euphemism I’m using to say: I’m dubious about Gosling’s Best Actor win at the Oscars.
A more positive comment: I’ve heard that some people were unsatisfied by Stone and Gosling’s opposite-of-brassy-Broadway singing voices. On the contrary, their voices in all of their roughly-primed imperfection was one of the aspects of the movie I enjoyed the most. It made me feel like Mia and Seb were regular mortals like the rest of us. I don’t want a story about immaculately conceived heavenly beings. I want gray areas and flaws and human limitations despite innate goodness, a truthful reflection of the universal human struggle.
**This should go without saying, but heaping critiques onto my impression of something I enjoy very much doesn’t diminish how strong my love is for it. Is that believable? In any case, it’s true. Just something to keep in mind for the reviews to follow.**
Rated: 10/10