Snore Snore Land

Here are the few things I knew about La La Land before watching it - it got called an Oscarbait, it received some noteworthy awards and pretty much everyone who watched it seemed to either like it or love it. So I imagined that the "Oscarbait" part related purely to the movie's theme and perhaps cast, suggesting it fit jury's preferences perfectly, but film also had a lot to offer to everyone.


Now I'm more inclined to say that this is a movie only for people who like the type of films that win Oscars. Technically, this should fit right up my alley. I like Gosling and Stone, I don't dislike musicals and like meta stories. Problem is, it really isn't one. This isn't some sort of "quintessential" naive story about success in Hollywood. It doesn't play with the tropes and doesn't seem to learn from its predecessors. It's just another one of those, and the novelty seems to be simply in fact that these haven't been made recently.

I have mixed feelings about the camera work - sometimes it was interesting, but sometimes really boring. I'm not too crazy about the choreography. The songs are completely unmemorable. Quite frankly, there's just nothing particularly interesting about this movie. Sure, the acting was good, but which Hollywood movie's isn't? The few attempts to create unique scenes fell completely flat (like the one in planetarium).

In fact there are only two parts of the movie that peaked my interest. One was the "what might've been" scene, which had really good editing and visual imagery, going between abstract and realistic. The other was the conclusion of how exactly Mia got her success, owning it to not only persistence, but also doing something unique that actually only she could do (whereas earlier she was competing for roles that gave her no chance to stand out and was merely hoping to eventually land a lucky shot). I suppose the movie is similarly clever and realistic in other parts of the story, at least compared to more cliche artistic success movies, so perhaps I just expected too much and thus couldn't be satisfied with it.

Otherwise, it was just boring. Few nice touches and I guess Gosling's character was interesting enough, but it felt like they could've done so much more with him.