Film Analysis Of La La Land, By Damien Chazelle

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If you have only heard about La La Land, you may be wondering what all the song and dance is about. But if you have been tracing its trajectory for a while, you’ll know that song and dance is the whole idea. Winner of seven Golden Globes and six Academy Awards, the 2016 Hollywood blockbuster has got viewers leaving the cinema with a tear in their eye, a song in their heart and a clear six inches of thin air between the soles of their shoes and the pavement.
Written and directed by Damien Chazelle (Whiplash), La La Land has respect for movie tradition, in the sense that it references some of the best elements of the big studio musicals that were last in style in the 1960s – the kind with sun-drenched boulevards, sorbet-colored minidresses and
The film is dotted throughout with production numbers by Justin Hurwitz that are more than enough to qualify La La Land as a musical, but not so much that the characters are subordinated to the songs. There’s this essential mundaneness in the way they perform – it slows things in the best way and brings Seb and Mia down to human level. We’re not looking at spectacle. We’re looking at people expressing their feelings, joy, melancholy and desire. However, Chazelle’s highlighted accomplishment has to be the movie’s perfectly crafted finale which takes place five years after the main action. “It's not that I literally write the last scene first, but it's just nice to know what your destination is, and then just backtrack, or figure out what is the most elegant way to build to that.” – the director explained how he did it on an interview with Cinema Blend. The film switches to a dream ballet of everything we’ve seen up until that point, only with a few vital differences. In other words, we get to see our initial expectations play out, represented by dance sequences, shadow plays and home video-style recreations of the life not lived. Whether La La Land’s ending plays as sad or happy surprisingly comes down to how much faith we have in happy endings in the first place. It’s easy to think that dreams don’t come true, and that love only exists in motion pictures. But La La Land serves to remind us that movies can still be magical, and they provide a channel for us to see miracles in the world

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