10. La La Land

10. LA LA LAND

Director: Damien Chazelle

Release date: December 26, 2016

When hot and tired motorists trapped on the offramp of the LA freeway break into song, the opening scene of 31-year-old director Damien Chazelle’s latest flick is immediately jarring. Why? Because original live-action movie musicals have almost become a thing of the past. Indeed, La La Land itself feels like a strange set of anachronisms – modern technology littered through the tale of a bygone era. A seamless marriage of old and new.

The opening song-and-dance number on the crowded offramp, ‘Another Day of Sun’, that opens this wonderful movie, demands an adjustment from the viewer – the promise that you’re about to encounter something more than a two-hour episode of Glee.

Once you’ve settled into the rhythm and tone of La La Land, where characters do indeed break into song throughout, you’re richly rewarded by this heartfelt tribute to Los Angeles (LA LA Land, get it?) and to the wide-eyed dreamers that venture there in search of fame.

There’s no doubt that much of the movie’s charm is derived from two immensely talented leads. This is the third time Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have played on-screen lovers, and their natural chemistry is palpable. Gosling has never been more charming or funny. In La La Land he and Stone play Sebastian and Mia. The former is a jazz pianist who dreams of opening his own club and keeping the dying genre alive. The latter is an aspiring actress, who serves coffee at a cafe on the Warner Bros lot and spends her days between fruitless auditions. Their paths cross and they fall in love.

La La Land is an excellent modern musical, with some genuinely catchy compositions that punctuate key moments. There’s some breath-taking long takes and scintillating camera work, with Chazelle demonstrating a keen eye for set pieces and choreography. The story, of course, is filtered through a romantic, old-Hollywood nostalgia and draws on the visual and sonic language of movie musicals to tell the story of these two lovers in search of their respective dreams. In this way, La La Land’s themes are comparable to Chazelle’s previous film, the very impressive Whiplash – an exploration of the personal sacrifices required to step out from the crowd. La La Land is likely to be a monstrous success and is, perhaps, a modern classic.