The 2002 Best Picture Oscar for “Chicago,” ended a long dry period for the movie musical, which had once dominated Hollywood. Such expensive bombs as “Hello, Dolly!,” “Star,” and “Doctor Doolittle,” sent the genre into disrepute in the 1960s, until animated Disney features like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin” conditioned a whole new generation to the once-awkward notion of characters breaking out into song. Plowing the newly fertile ground was not only “Chicago,” but Baz Luhrmann’s rock-infused “Moulin Rouge” as well as television shows like “Glee” and “High School Musical.” Now comes “La La Land,” starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 31 to rave reviews, many of which are predicting Oscar nominations for the film, its stars and its writer-director Damien Chazelle (“Whiplash”). The movie receives a stateside release on December 2.Unlike the its predecessors, “La La Land” is a bold conflation of contemporary urban romance with the song-and-dance memes of musicals of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. There is the fantastical thrown in for good measure — at one point the star-crossed lovers are dancing over the skies of Los Angeles’s Griffith Park Observatory — not unlike the singing moon that blessed Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor in “Moulin Rouge.” Critic Owen Gleiberman of Variety called “La La Land” a “voluptuous high note of retro glamor and style” and the most “audacious big-screen musical in a long time.” He praised the the 31-year-old Chazelle for going “…whole hog in re-creating a lavish studio-system musical, replete with starry nights and street lamps lighting up the innocence of soft-shoe romance, and two people who were meant for each other literally dancing on air.”The characters Chazelle has written for Stone and Gosling, however, are more boilerplate. He is an edgy jazz pianist, straining against artistic limitations imposed by the need to pay the rent; she is an aspiring actor-playwright who works as a barista in a studio commissary. The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy praised Stone (“Birdman”) as “…emotionally alive and able to shift gears on a dime….Stone is all the more convincing in this context as she has the kind of looks that would have been appealing in any era, particularly the 1930s and 1950s.”And Alonso Durade of The Wrap noted that “Gosling and Stone’s powerful chemistry is as palpable as it was in ‘Crazy Stupid Love’…and each of the of them conveys their character’s love of the arts and drive to succeed.”While most of the reviews coming out of Venice for “La La Land” were five-starred, some expressed reservations. Gleiberman noted that Chazelle’s chosen form undercuts the emotional complexity of his “age-of-alienation love story.”The critic added, “‘La La Land’ isn’t a masterpiece (and on some level it wants to be.) Yet it’s an elating ramble of a movie, ardent and full of feeling, passionate yet exquisitely controlled. It winds up swimming in melancholy, yet its most convincing pleasures are the moments when it lifts the audience into a state of old-movie exaltation, leading us to think, ‘What a glorious feeling. I’m happy again.’”The songs for “La La Land” are by Justin Hurwitz with lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. The latter two are the songwriters for “Dear Evan Hansen,” the critically-acclaimed musical which opened last fall at Second Stage and will transfer this season to Broadway. And in a not-unrelated development, it was recently announced that Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge” is being prepared as a Broadway musical with a book by John Logan and direction by Alex Timbers.The musical symbiosis between Hollywood and Broadway continues apace.
↧