moviebuoy’s review published on Letterboxd:
Opening with a bright and brash musical number that crashes into your head like a cymbal sets the tone for this wildly ambitious yet truthfully intimate movie. The impressively encompassing choreography hurdles audience hesitancy and turns it to joy, before breaking way to the loneliness of isolation and near silence - and what is perhaps it’s underlying struggle; dreamers vs. sacrifice and regret.
It’s a critical piece of postmodernity that leaps forward where ‘(500) Days of Summer’ or ‘Birdman’, films with striking similarities, merely crept. If art is cyclical than ‘La La’ embodies the perfect moment of transition where modern drama and cynicism give way to the past.
And this nostalgic twist permeates through every creative choice in the film; character, plot, setting, music. It is a décollage of 50s chic, full of deconstructed archetypes undercut with that modern cynicism and set against reminiscent art forms; jazz and Bogart, tap and James Dean. I don’t want to say too much about the film as going into it cold will give you the full effect.
I wrestling a lot with this rating. I try to review these films individually and on their own merit; a good rom-com may score higher than a mediocre action/sci-fi films even though I clearer prefer the latter. And this was particularly troubling; but themes of love and regret and ambition are universal and permeate through the strictest of genre pieces. They speak to the human condition and trump preference or preconception, like this movie did mine.
Is this film the Best Picture? Possibly. Is this film the best Musical, the pinnacle of its’ genre? Undoubtedly.
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