Film Title: La La Land
Director: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone
Writer: Damien Chazelle
Cinematography: Linus Sandgren
Composer: Justin Hurwitz
Genre: Musical
Letterboxd
Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Summary: Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress, serves lattes to movie stars in between auditions and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz musician, scrapes by playing cocktail party gigs in dingy bars. But as success mounts, they are faced with decisions that begin to fray the fragile fabric of their love affair, and the dreams they worked so hard to maintain in each other threaten to rip them apart.
What did I think?
Well.
By the end of La La Land I was silently curled up in my seat sobbing my heart out. Throughout La La Land I had a gigantic grin plastered all over my face, possibly making me look like a lunatic. Thankfully cinemas are dark.
This movie is a magical experience and the audience was utterly silent throughout most of it, unless... you went with my girlfriend who started fidgeting all over her seat about midway through, and was almost thrown out of the screening and consequently our home, by me.
She was bored. She loves musicals, thought the music was pleasant, Emma Stone an excellent actress, but she was bored. I think this film is for dreamers. La La Land speaks to people who seek love, creativity, and to people who want to find a deeper meaning in life. My girlfriend is a practical person, she has no time for dreams.
I'm not even kidding when I say it touched my soul and broke my heart and made me happy all at the same time.
I can't wait to see this again and sob some more. It's as perfect as a film can get and the on-screen chemistry between Gosling and Stone alone is worth the price of admission.