Lala Land movie review

[steven clark]

Lala Land is a new musical sweeping the cinemas, and is a splashy, old-fashioned sort of story of Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), who meet in a traffic jam in LA where everyone breaks out in song and dance, but flip each other the bird. She is an actress trying to make it, he's a pianist wanting to break out of doing gigs and open his own club.

The songs are very fun and the dancing good, with lots of color. The story is contrived, but also has the edge of two young people realizing their dream, but it turns out their dream doesn't necessarily include them as a couple. It's a story of young twenty-something love. It's a story with nostalgia, but also with a tang of reality, knowing things must come to an end. The music and dancing easily blends into this in a way a lot of other musicals don't.

Two points: the film is in a white frame. The couple is white, the music pretty standard musical numbers, but two racial points intrude. One, Sebastian's dream is to open a jazz club, and he's in love with the style more than the blacks who play with him. Like a lot of cultural whites, he worships jazz. Then, his sister (a very secondary character), is shown dating a black guy, then marrying him, and they have a child. All in the background, but another reminder of the obligatory race mixing we have to endure.
It is a very delightful and fun movie, and it's interesting how it became so popular around Christmas…probably because Trump had just got elected, and people wanted a happy movie to watch and escape from the Trumpster and the PC deluge everyone was forced to contend with.