Every now and then, Jenn picks a movie for us to watch and I’m not allowed to complain about it. It’s a rare treat for her. Last night she picked La La Land. I had never heard of it before but it sounded perfectly stupid. I kept my big yap shut and watched it dutifully, despite finding it insipid, typical, vanilla, safe, limp, uninspired, uninteresting. There was the same old romantic story that’s been used for ONE HUNDRED FUCKING YEARS NOW — that’s not even a joke or an exaggeration: young unlikely couple meet and fall in love, everything is great, they have a stupid fight/misunderstanding, they work out it. Yeah ok all you Hollywood sycophants gnashing your teeth at me, the ending had a twist but it was a lame one that still delivered a happy ending after all, so don’t give me any “La La Land was groundbreaking” bullshit.
I will say that I was really impressed by Gosling’s piano-playing (I figured he had played since childhood but turns out he learned if just for this role), and Emma Stone was great at everything she did — she’s talented, for sure. The rest of the film sucked though. Even Jenn was underwhelmed by it, and she likes musicals and ‘light cinema.’
Throughout the film, I kept thinking, “this seems like a real Hollywood darling flick” — it had that perfect balance of being just vanilla-artsy enough to satisfy the pretentious wannabe artist/award ceremony crowd, and all the boring standard ingredients to satisfy bonehead mainstream audiences. I looked it up today and what a surprise, it received all sorts of nominations and awards back in 2016. I’ve really developed a knack for sensing this shit. I’m on to their formula, big time.
There’s not much point in me raging on about this topic since I’ve raged about it many times already. But rest assured, even if I scale back my beating of dead horses, the intensity of my disgust never wanes: La La Land, and the forces that both birthed it and then revered it, are fecal in nature.
crimson highway 