La La Land

Old school Hollywood romance, a classic musical.
So this turned out to be a good one.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are two people who find each other in the craziness of La La Land, the perfect star cross lovers situation as Gosling plays a jazz musician dreaming of opening a pure Jazz club and Stone is an actress just trying to get a part, and their brief encounter turns into a love affair.
Not really that big of a fan of musicals. Just the idea that at any moment the cast can break out into song and dance I just find a little annoying.
But I really liked the production design of La La Land. It’s just so beautiful and gives off everything that you’d find in golden age Hollywood.

The art direction was made to look glamorous to show off the magic of La La land.
The photography gave homage to the movies of yesteryear.

The story was perfectly basic, something you seen many times before, which was used to enhanced the beauty of how the story was told.
And the cast! Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone did a descent job trying to be Fred and Ginger. The two have chemistry. Gosling was my favorite out of the two. I think I’ve only seen him do really intense stuff so it threw me off watching him do comedy, but the offset only made it funnier.
As a musical, it works for me overall. I found one or two songs classical, but the rest was more of an overall feeling. No single song steps out as much as everything works so well together to enhance telling the story.

Filmed by the guy who made Whiplash(La La Land has a small role for JK Simmons who won an Oscar for his role in that film), I still like Whiplash far better but this was a great follow up.