Review of La La Land (2016) by Per Gunnar J — 05 Jul 2017

This is definitely not a movie that I would have chosen to watch all by myself which perhaps explain why I thought it was just surprisingly okay to watch. However my girlfriend absolutely wanted to watch it so I got it. As it turned out my girlfriend had only gone by the number of Oscars and not really looked up what kind of movie it actually was so in the end I was enjoying the movie a lot more than she did.

This movie is pretty much a quite classical Hollywood musical with a non too original story, nice music and dancing. In addition the cinematography is simply excellent. This is the strong point of this movie. The rest of the movie is of lesser interest to me but the cinematography is really, really good. The scene, pictured on the movie poster, were Mia and Sebastian dances and everything in the scene are dark blue tones except Mia's bright yellow dress is so simple and yet so beautiful.

Everything else about this movie is...okay. Okay acting, okay story etc. As I wrote before this is really not my kind of movie so forgive me for not being overly enthusiastic. I am sure those into these kind of movies cannot understand how anyone can give it less than a full set of stars but hey, different tastes and all that.

I cannot make up my mind about ending. On one hand I am a sucker for happy endings which this one falls a wee bit short on. On the other hand I have to commend the writer/director for not taking the path of least resistance and instead putting together something a wee bit different.

I did feel that a part of the movie was missing though. I would have liked to see the parts where Mia and Sebastian actually fulfilled their respective dreams. Jumping fast forward to the ending like the movie did felt a bit like they either ran out of money or they manage to misplace half the story!

Anyway, I enjoyed the movie more than I thought I would.