tromber’s review published on Letterboxd:
This thing is in my marrow, it has settled into my soul. I saw it for a third time and as soon as the Cinemascope gag started, a huge smile broke across my face. I had to fight back tears from the second the music started. I was as engulfed in the love story as the first time and as shattered by the conclusion as I've ever been.
I've said it before but this film is pure. It opens on pure, unfiltered, ambitious, passionate joy and takes it through its natural conclusion. It builds in obstacles and love and heartbreak and failure pain and gives us something truer and more palpable than what we started with. It takes us from naive joy to weathered fulfillment. To completion and satisfaction built on the bones of defeat and hardship. The best place to be.
Happy honest joy is a wonderful thing but it's hollow and can only sustain for so long. The dreamers La La Land celebrates are those who found their joy and fought to make it last and fought to make it worth something. They hammered at it and forged something unbreakable.
To continue the theme of my self indulgent and rambling La La Land personal essays in lieu of proper reviews, for my own purposes I would like to provide an update. When I saw this film for the first time it reawakened me, I've said that a thousand times in the month since. And it refocused and simultaneously grounded and lifted me.
I submitted The Today King to contests and I just recently posted it on the Blacklist. None of this means anything professionally, it's just important to me. It's doubtful I could even place or that someone could even see or read it from these outlets. These won't lead anywhere. But I take it as a symbol. No more quiet shame. I put my work into the ether for people to see and judge and tear down. And then, and this again is literally nothing, but someone has downloaded my script from the Blacklist. It doesn't say who and they haven't reviewed it or rated it, and likely won't, but someone saw the title, read the logline, and wanted more. It's a nothing, it's a scrap. It's something.
The other thing La La Land inspired me to do was to start work on a new screenplay. I had an idea a year ago, wrote it down, told myself it was beyond my ability to write and probably couldn't be told in a restrained screenplay format. On New Years I started writing, and today I finish the first draft. Admittedly this first draft is 180 pages, which is absolutely insane and is going to be an absolute monster to edit, but I did it. Again, it's nothing, it's a scrap. But it's also something.
It's the quickest draft I've written and I was able to take everything I learned over all the previous screenplays and stories and streamline a process, while crash coursing through some new lessons and processes along the way. I was also able to lay complicated thematic groundwork over the narrative and weave the various character arcs from square one. Something that normally doesn't become clear until later drafts. I have a long way to go, just on this screenplay (let alone in this stupid dream), but it's on the way.
And the best part is that La La Land may have helped me solve the structural problem I was having with a different screenplay I have on the backburner. So that once I pause or get stuck or disillusioned from this one, I can keep on working and bang out the other.
Right now I feel like I'm where Mia and Seb were at the beginning. They know what they want, he has the work ready and needs the opportunity, she is enduring her own defeats and just needs a way in. Add to that the fact that I'm on the wrong side of the country with zero idea on what happens after I finish these screenplays and toss them in a drawer. This isn't a complaint or a rant.
It's a thank you. To Damien and Justin and Emma and Ryan. Because when I was losing hope and fading fast and falling back into a dangerous place again, they put on a show and reminded me that it's hard for everyone, but there are others out there struggling with their dreams. Others who have no fucking clue but are fighting. People who are in love with the dream more than anything and anyone else. People who will die alone in a gutter if it means they gave it their best shot.
I hope I get the chance one day to thank these wonderful bastards in person.
