La La Land: A Tonic for our Times. The Best Film of the Year.

Movie Review: La La Land

Directors: Damien Chazelle

Reviewed: 9 December 2016

jamesintexas rating--****



Stop whatever you are doing this weekend, and see La La Land.  It reminded me of the transcendent power of cinema, touching on Casablanca, Rebel Without A Cause, and Singing in the Rain effortlessly and effervescently.  To dismiss it as a musical or pure escapism is a mistake.  The film is deeply philosophical and full of wonderment, and Damien Chazelle and his cast and crew are deserving of all the accolades that are sure to fall their way.  It is the best film of the year.

Mia (Emma Stone) is an aspiring actress, current barista, on a Hollywood studio lot; Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a committed jazz pianist with dreams of opening a club one day. The film chronicles their paths crossing multiple times and eventual love affair and more, but from the get-go, Chazelle takes his cast out of LA traffic, notoriously hellish, and begins spinning them around and forging a musical out of the space of the freeway and blocked cars. It is a dazzling and audacious beginning to the film, and its infectiousness permeates everything that follows.  Stone and Gosling are both charming and fully capable of handling the physical demands of the film, gliding their way through and past famous landmarks and gorgeous light-diffused sunsets.  Their charm and chemistry, firmly established in Crazy, Stupid, Love never wavers, and it is comforting to know that we will be seeing these two stars perform for many years to come.  The film engages with questions about burgeoning relationships and commitment to  dreams, as well as what pivotal moments in our lives look like and feel like, both in the moment and in retrospect.  Chazelle makes a leap forward from his passionate and abrasive film Whiplash and plays with time and narrative in ways that are both bold and breathtaking, with the future coming back around to the past in ways that surprise.  And there's even a fun cameo from his previous film to reward viewers.

And the music and dancing!  I lack the full vocabulary and awareness of the multiple styles and references that Chazelle uses in the film, but I will just say this: it is phenomenal to watch.  La La Land is a tonic for our times because it is medicine for the soul, healing art that inspires and calls upon the deepest urges within us to create art, to view art, to appreciate art, to become one with art. "City of Stars" is hauntingly beautiful and sure to win Best Song and it echoes in my brain, three weeks after seeing the film: "I think I want it stay / City of Stars / Are you shining just for me? / City of Stars / You never shined so brightly."

La La Land seems all the more powerful when juxtaposed against the current scary political climate of late 2016, a year that has been ruthless in its claiming of artists who have meant a great deal to me, from Alan Rickman to David Bowie.  The film is unabashedly hopeful and romantic and sad and light and light on its feet, and I do not know if there will be a better film this year.  Bravo.

Whiplashing of the Tongues: J.K. Simmons Behaving Badly.

Movie Review: Whiplash

Director: Damien Chazelle

Reviewed: 13 August 2015

jamesintexas rating--***

I don't like that Bobby Knight threw a chair at an athlete in a basketball game or practice. There were always rumors that my HS coach threw a desk once when a state qualifying athlete was late for the second time to practice and had to be kicked off the team publically. In my worst moments, I've berated students and been loud and obnoxious in ways that are infinitely embarrassing and hopefully not collected on film. There were rumors at a previous school I worked at about an overhead projector being tossed out a window to prove a point. Eruptions of fountains of anger and the ideas of brutal mentorship, hazing and hypocrisy, and the pursuit of greatness in art are at the center of Damien Chazelle's lean, often breath-taking film Whiplash with the centerpiece being a battle of wills between conductor/dictator Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) at a conservatory and his pupil of promise Andrew (Miles Teller), a drummer with high hopes. The film examines what is necessary to be truly great, with one character positing that a thrown instrument and cathartic challenge: To be great is to be pushed past your own limits. I think of the professor played by Stellan Skarsgaard in Good Will Hunting: "I was great BECAUSE I was pushed!" How much is too much is not a question that this film is really interested in engaging though, and by thinly developing Andrew and Fletcher, its third act holds it back from greatness.

Chazelle revels in establishing the mystique of Fletcher, a shadowy figure who haunts the hallways of the conservatory, intense in his nearly-military running of his classroom, frightening in his berating of his students (all male), but the implication is that he gets results, so he's allowed to be a monster. Simmons won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his visceral work here, and his relentlessness is shocking and impossible to look away from onscreen. Teller struggles more to convey Andrew's interiority, partially because though he's nearly in every screen, and the story is ostensibly about his journey, he does not narrate, he rarely talks through his thinking, and he remains a bit of a cipher. He loves to drum, drums until his hands bleed, and there's a bit about him trying to make his father (Paul Rieser) proud. However, the film suffers because of its thinly developed characters and plot contrivances in the last third. How long would a teacher like Fletcher be allowed to threaten his students? In the age of cell phones and secret videos, his vicious, virulent attacks would be broadcast more publically, I would think in this era.

Whiplash wants us to consider if some great art and greatness comes from being pushed past your limits. However, why does that pushing have to be so degrading? There's little interest or explanation for Fletcher's homophobia, anti-Semitism, or just plain nastiness, and without any context, it just seems like bullying to me. There's always moments of truth and confrontation in the classroom and as a coach of athletes, but does fear and threat of violence really carry someone into the next plane of their work? I keep coming back to the idea of is it better to be feared or loved, and the adage that fear lasts longer than love. The ending of the film is intentionally open-ended with the idea that the both pupil and master could be right, though I know less about how the pupil differs from the master here. The editing is truly wonderful (also Academy Award winning) with its musical, drum-beat punctuating rhythms, and for a film that seems to occur mostly in rehearsal spaces or performances around the edges of darkness, Chazelle delivers quite a potent experience despite its flaws.