Yesterday afternoon I decided to check out La La Land, the new musical written and directed by Damien Chazelle (of Whiplash fame), and starring frequent collaborators Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. A good friend of mine had been basically heaping praise upon this film every chance he could get so I figured it probably wouldn’t be a complete waste of $13 and two hours to watch this in the cinema. I was very surprised to find out that the cinema (on a Thursday afternoon after the holidays, no less) had a pretty decent turnout, about 80% full - but then I should probably mention I’m one of those cynical bastards who has never really cared much for overt romance or musicals. Luckily for La La Land, most people like to go to the movies to feel happy - and this is most definitely a movie to make you feel happy.

It’s not perfect, in my opinion. During the last week of December I posted some threads on /r/movies for the users to discuss the best moments from the films of 2016 and in every single thread, La La Land invariably got at least one mention. I would not blame someone for expecting nothing short of a life-changing emotional upheaval after watching this movie based on what reddit was saying about it - and it does have a lot of good things going for it.

Chief among those good things are the film’s endlessly watchable leads, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. I believe this is their third film together after Crazy, Stupid, Love and Gangster Squad (top kek), but I have not seen either of those movies so I can’t attest to their chemistry there. If it’s anything like the chemistry they had in La La Land, though, director Chazelle’s allusions to the two as a modern-day Doris Day and Rock Hudson may very well be warranted. It is pretty much impossible to watch this movie and not end up loving either (or both) of them. Gosling has long been circlejerked in popular culture as the Ideal Boyfriend (TM), which is not necessarily a viewpoint I subscribe to, but he is certainly as dreamy as any actor could be in this film. Stone - who won an award at the Venice Film Festival for her performance here - continues to prove that she is one of the best working actresses under the age of 30 around today. She switches so naturally from the mild sarcastic humour which made her famous in earlier roles (e.g. Easy A) to a wide-eyed naivete and back again that is pretty remarkable and endearing to witness. The two of them have a lovely scene in a cinema that is showing Rebel Without A Cause around the middle of the film which was probably my favourite scene of the entire film, because of the way Gosling and Stone looked at each other and touched each other. Even the most dismissive of romantic skeptics will likely be won over by the love story of Sebastian and Mia in La La Land.

And much like its beautiful protagonists, I also found the film’s visuals to be quite visually pleasing. I anticipate a lot of people are going to want to visit Los Angeles after watching this because Chazelle has a seemingly endless supply of interesting and cute locales in the city to set his scenes. The use of neon lighting and high contrast is also frequently employed and often serves to give otherwise fairly mundane scenarios an almost painterly quality. A musical is probably the last movie that you should watch with the sound off but this one would still look damn good even if you did do that.

My qualms with the film are probably more like glorified nitpicks but they were significant enough to keep this from being a perfect 10 for me. I found the camerawork a little too frenetic at times; it was most noticeable in the opening sequence, in which the camera darts around and tries to follow about five different people around as they sing and dance while stuck in gridlock on one of LA’s many expansive overpasses. For a film that took so much delight in savouring minor moments and small interactions, I sometimes wished that the camera would linger just a little bit longer on the lovely things being shown.

I did also find the pacing in some of the extended musical sequences to be inconsistent. This was most obvious during the sequence when Sebastian and Mia explore the Griffith Observatory and dance and (in one dream-like scene) float into a sky of stars and dance some more. It was cute but went on for far too long, and my opinion was further validated by the fact that that sequence was immediately followed by a montage of our leads going to different places in LA and falling in love. Did we really need two long scenes just to illustrate that they were falling in love? Personally, I didn’t think so. La La Land does not have a long runtime by any means (it is just over two hours long) but perhaps some of that time could have been used to showcase some other things - for instance, I absolutely loved the brief snippets of Mia’s auditions and would have loved to see Emma Stone do more comedic scenes like that.

I felt similarly towards the final musical sequence of the film, which I won’t describe explicitly here for those of you who’ve not yet seen La La Land. In essence I felt that it could have been much shorter and that it could have basically been conveyed through one single look between Sebastian and Mia - which, in fact, they do share in that scene. In addition to it being overlong I also found the location of it (it didn’t take place in Los Angeles) jarring after having been hit over the head with beautiful LA imagery for the past two hours.

As I said, though, these criticisms definitely veer towards the ‘nitpick’ territory of flaws. Overall the film is incredibly charming and as fine a feel-good film as I’ve watched in some time. It’s probably not going to make my top ten of 2016 simply because I watched too many damn movies (especially in the last quarter of the year) that were top-notch but this is not exactly a fault of La La Land. It will do well in awards season and it’s not hard to see why, as it offers a pretty delightful antidote to otherwise dour current events.