Review of La La Land (2016) by Happy D — 06 Mar 2017

I confess I don't pay much attention to movie buzz or awards shows. Sometimes, this leads to surprises, such as when I left the theater of one of the worst movies I've seen in a year, only to near-literally run face-first into the promotional cutout for La La Land, gilded with rave-review quotes and blaring award nomination claims.

I have been mystified ever since. La La Land is awful. Just awful. It's not even good at what it tries to be; not a single song from the movie stuck with me the moment the last note faded. Ostensibly a throwback to the Good Old Days (ugh), it only manages to succeed in that respect by virtue (read: detriment) of its hideous whiteness. It's just...

Okay, you know what? Let's just get into it.

Mia (played by the usually delightful Emma Stone) is an aspiring actress, living with a bunch of disposable women so unimportant they only exist to unconvincingly suggest Mia is white-people-version-of-struggling financially, and to sing an instantly-forgettable song about Mia prostituting herself at a Showbiz Industry Party on the chance someone might notice her, then disappear and are never heard from again. Which is fitting, since Mia is similarly a barely two-dimensional prop for the men behind (and in front of) the cameras.

Not that we believe Mia is struggling; she works as a barista for the rich and famous, right in the rosy-pink cornhole center of Peckerwood, Crackerfornia. (Seriously, this movie couldn't get any whiter.).

Sebastian (played by the perpetually sleepy-eyed, yet usually likable Ryan Gosling) lives alone (in a place he couldn't afford) because nobody could possibly like this self-satisfied, pretentious douchebag. He's also broke (see above, re: couldn't afford), because he keeps getting fired for being a self-satisfied, pretentious douchebag. We're supposed to sympathize with him because reasons. They actually give a reason, but it's a stupid one, because this prick should have been fired long before he proved what a pompous tool he is by demanding his version of purity.

Whaddya mean, "purity", you ask? What, is he a jazz fan or something? OF COURSE HE'S A JAZZ FAN. What other kind of music could such a strident, humorless, unlikeable asshole possibly take mortally seriously than the music of pretentious hacks and dilettantes? Oh, and he plays it, too, because duh. Jazz is the music of frustrated mediocrity. But I won't hold that against the movie.

I digress.

It also doesn't help that he's another white knight - emphasis on the white - trying to save The Blah People from themselves, as amply demonstrated when he inexplicably lands a paying gig with a jazz-ish-sorta-not-exactly-inspired fusion band, led, of course, by one of those silly black people who ruin good music, natch. How brave to put a whitewashed spin on the norm; we've *never* seen that before. Where would black people be, without savior-douche Sebastian to reverse-Pat Boone them?

So. Mia and Sebastian (Goddess Eris, even his *name* is intolerable) meet and like each other for no reason just because without explanation apropos of nothing inexplicably something something script. Not before Sebastian is a complete dick to Mia, of course. Then they sing together about how safe it is to walk around their heavily-policed, lily-white neighborhood in the middle of the night in Los Angeles. Look, I know I'm hitting the race thing pretty hard, but in my defense, they started it.

There's absolutely no tension in Mia's so-quickly-dispelled-it-never-existed resistance to Sebastian's super-winning "charms" (Does he pinch his ham flower so hard it could cut a railroad spike in half when Emma says she doesn't like jazz? Duh-DOY. Does he aggressively browbeat her until she says she's wrong out of sheer exhaustion? Stop asking stupid questions). Nobody in the entirety of existence believes they won't get together. IT'S IN THE MOVIE POSTER, for crying out loud. Put your lame attempts at tension somewhere you haven't already given away the resolution.

So, anyway, they have a relationship while I nodded off during a salad-days montage. Seriously, I dozed for about five minutes during this. Blah blah blah, forty excruciating minutes of Sebastian looking constipated because he's getting rich and famous by playing music people actually like, and then Mia and Sebastian have their clockwork, by-the-numbers, Big Scary Fight right on cue, and naturally, it makes no sense, with Mia and Sebastian emoting because the script says so, and not because what they're saying or doing would be upsetting. "You want me to be HAPPY?!? THAT MAKES ME ANGRY! GRRR!" (I'm not kidding; that was a key point in their argument.).

Then follows another chance for me to take a nap, so at least there's that, while something something montage. Mia becomes rich and famous, because of course she does, despite the movie taking great pains to paint her as eminently mediocre at best. Sebastian ditches that awful black man and his soulless cultural appropriation of true, pure white aryan jazz, and starts his dream nightclub nobody would ever be interested in going to, which is of course standing-room-only filled with who-the-hipster-knows, because GAWD, what a hellhole of excrement-reeking pretentiousness and awful music. Must be a front for a meth lab or something.

Then there's a montage, because of course there is. Then it ends an hour and a half too late. I won't spoil the ending, because there isn't one. Nobody learns or grows, white people succeed because of course they do, and the movie writer and a few other douchenozzles hose their shorts because jazz is awesome and not at all a dissonant, pointless, masturbatory exercise in self-congratulatory, Grateful Dead-level dicking around on instruments for musicians who were never talented enough to play music with any meaning. The End.

At least they got the name right, because La La Land is the only place this supermassive rusty bullet hole of a movie could possibly be considered good, let alone so amazingly, gloriously, fabulously scrumtrulescent that Hollywood has no choice but to explode in an auto-rimming, self-congratulatory orgasm of--.

Ohhhhhh. NOW I get it.