UPDATE (05/26/17): hello weary traveler! if you have stumbled onto this review just know that i basically rescind everything i say here, as i do still like the film but have cooled on it since writing this. i've decided to leave this up for posterity and because it's a solid time capsule of my life at the end of 2016, somehow. just know that this isn't the best film of the year (and actually neither is MOONLIGHT, it's AMERICAN HONEY by a long ass shot.)

the following is not hyperbole:

LA LA LAND is the best film of the year (sorry, Barry). it is quite possibly the best film released this decade so far; it's easily one of the five best released this century so far. it is quite possibly the best musical i have ever seen in any capacity--theatre, film or otherwise. it is one of the best love stories ever put to screen. it makes WHIPLASH look like a complete joke. it is an unabashed love letter to music, cinema, art and life itself in a time when even the mere insinuation of optimism is met with scorn and derision.

...it was a lot.

going into this i expected this was going to be a groundbreaking smash hit that would singlehandedly revitalize the genre of musicals, catalyzing a grand new tradition of Love in the Time of Swing akin to your Lubitsch's and your Demy's and your Minelli's. i mean think about it, WHIPLASH was enormously successful for an indie hit, one of the few in recent memory i can think of to have actual mainstream crossover appeal. and this one, well, doesn't have Miles Fucking Teller in it so at least it's got that going for it.

plus musicals are *the* zeitgeist now, with *the* distillation of the millennial generation so far being a hip-hopera about boardroom meetings regarding the establishment of a financial regimen for the United States. and in an era where acute reminiscence is readily praised, i would expect something adhering so closely to established paradigms to be a groundbreaking success.

but like fuck is this not true.

this is *****soooooo***** *****not***** a mainstream film by any quantifiable means. it's tempestuous and mercurial and surreal and idiotic and earth-shattering in ways box-office-grenades absolutely cannot be in order to ensure success.

worse yet, it's habitually referential to a long-passed era of cinema, one wholly incongruous to our modern ideals. 2016 has been a year marred with tragedy, scare-tactics and fatalism, that's something that doesn't need to be repeated. yet Old Hollywood was a time of satiation, permutations of idealism intermingling with even the most dire pessimism.

my main grievance with something like THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN is that despite its modern time period it's a film wholeheartedly stuck in the past, so much so that it feels misaligned with its own setting. it very much wants to be updated and sleek, yet still a sort of nostalgic fever-dream for the 80s in the same way LA LA LAND is for the 50s. yet THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN can't seem to unravel itself from 1986, and the film falls to the same cliches that barely resonated thirty years ago but just ring discordant in the Donald Trump era.

and i actually went into it thinking it was set in the 1950s, and was later incredulous upon realizing the truth. as soon as that highway number got going, and the quotidian gave way to phantasms, celebratory figurines, performers taking the role of machines of imminent grandiosity, it hit me: some motherfucker was given 30 million dollars, in 2016, to make an original jazz musical, shot in cinemascope, hopelessly resigned to bygone eras, replete with antediluvian iconography, set in of all places the 21st century.

that's fucking immense.

and it's facts like those that make me question people riding that whole "cinema is dead" train. the circlejerk reached its apex last summer though, and i have a feeling with the crop of masterpieces spewing out at the tail-end of this infernal year. and there's no doubt to me if 2016 is in fact the death knell of cinema that it isn't because of any paucity of quality movies.

what does worry me, however, is that this film was a highly risky investment that i don't think is gonna turn around on profit. this thing can't possibly make its money back, and this formerly dormant fact is now screaming reality to me, which also comes with the realization that the evitable has now become quite inevitable:

we're never gonna see another movie like this.

we live in a day and age where goddamn Charlie Kaufman can't even get his films funded. the man who made SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is now waxing rhapsodic the benefits of making a feature film through Kickstarter. if that isn't an absolute tragedy i don't know what is.

but that's the thing, human drama is perilous territory for financiers, especially ones that live in the realms of a much-denigrated genre: the musical. it's no secret a large portion of the general populace dislikes them, and since this one contains entirely original material, i could understand being terrified if i were an investor and this screenplay was dropped on my desk. but my fears may have been assuaged if it turned out the script was less recondite, more staid than i thought it would be. three act structure, happy ending, modernist feel. then we can cram some stars in it, make it for half the asking-price and call it a day.

and i read some ballsy producers actually tried to do that. they wanted to make Ryan Gosling's character a fucking rock musician, as well as cutting the opening dance number and changing the ending. and that was actually the closest Damien Chazelle came to getting his film made before the success of WHIPLASH. it's safe to say any remotely sane filmmaker would just take the money, agree to disagree and move on.

but Damien Chazelle is not a sane filmmaker.

you can't be even a little sane to make such a searing, fractured portrait of cowardice and indignation. and that's basically what it is when you get down to it, which is what makes LA LA LAND so mind-alteringly brilliant. situated amidst the fantasy and observation is raw, feral emotion, two transients on the cusp of permanence, yet still vacillating between ambition and relegation.

what defines happiness? can desire be calculated? is there a reason to keep going? these are all definitively *human* questions, ones that require not just consciousness of our own selves, but consciousness of how humanity operates.

except these are the kinds of questions that terrify the disquieted suits of the film biz, in favor of increasing reliance on technology and synthesis. no, CGI and action-oriented filmmaking are not to be disparaged outright, but it's a telling sign of the times when a filmmaker as vapid and insipid as Christopher Nolan is seen as the last bastion of existential, contemplative filmmaking.

so when something like LA LA LAND rides into town there's disruption and occurrence--the hierarchies scatter, the fingers type and the traditionalists remove. because this is a film that scares Hollywood. it's a huge investment for a doomed product, and if it weren't for some newbie at Landmark this wouldn't even exist.

i think that's why i've never, and probably will never, see a film that relishes its own existence as much as this one does. this film, like so man of us, is just happy to be alive. for all of life's splendor and foundation, totality and remembrance, altruism and municipality, there's a somber undercurrent to it all. we know, like LA LA LAND knows, that the rug is gonna be ripped out from under us one day.

but right now, in this moment, we're just glad to be alive to see it happen.