Sidney Bechet shot somebody because they told him he played a wrong note.
I’m not sure how far I should take this so I’m starting this out on a google doc JUST IN CASE. This is hot off the moment of D to the K to the Motherfucking A to the Third Power texting me late at night after this screening that he had read my Letterbxd review on Destry Rides again and described it as “UNHINGED.” Well, maybe that wasn’t in capital letters. Maybe that was me transposing White House Assistant to the Chief of Staff Cassidy Huchinson’s famous text to a friend in describing what was going on in the West Wing on December 18th, 2020 in which three people who didn’t work for President Trump or work for the government told him to contest the election in some way on the same day Congress was set to certify the electoral vote: January 6th. The protest from a room full of trained and experienced Republican lawyers and politicians ot the President was of one mind and voice: no. The push and pull of that room was what was “UNHINGED” and looking back on my review of Destry Rides Again, well, I think I agree with Dave. It was UNHINGED. Maybe this is one of those reviews. LaLa Land seems like a strange one to dedicate that type of moniker. But you know what, I’m going to give it a fucking try.
Dave and I got into it recently after the Joan Jett/ Poison / Motley Crue/ Def Leppard concert. We left the Juicebox and headed to the IHOP (the full journey is another blog, I won’t repeat it here) and as we waxed intellectual on the meaning of only five thousand people showing up to watch the Queen of Rock and Roll, Joan Fucking Jett, rule for forty five straight minutes, only to have a stadium full of people act like Every Rose Has Its Thorn has more meaning than Bad Reputation, we veered as we always do to film, to musicals, and that’s when I let it drop that it was probably my least favorite genre and I only liked a handful of musicals. Actually, only three.
“Which ones?” Dave asked.
“Uhhhh, Seventeen Seventy-Six…:”
“Whaaaat?”
“...And Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”
“Dude, you’re twisted.”
“Oh. And Blues Brothers.”
“Still…twisted. Maybe a little less, but nevertheless.”
I spiked my coke at the Juicebox with vodka I brought in a plastic flask, and hit my coffee with it as I defended my actions. I repeated this conversation to my son the next day who immediately gave me his copy of LaLa Land on DVD. He found it at Half Price Books in the Montrose. Three dollars. I raised this kid. If he’s this smart, I should watch this film. It sat on my desk for weeks. Life went on, more indictments came, more subpoenas. Then a full on house raid by the FBI, just like in the movies. I cried. I laughed. I wished. I dreamed. Just like the movies. And tonight, I sat down and watched LaLa Land and I fucking loved it.
Dave and I lamented at a time (I am not sure if it made it onto a podcast) about how if you took a poll of the most ‘popular movies’ of the 1950’s, whatever ‘popular’ means, you would see films like The Ten Commandments. Ben-Hur. The Bridge on the River Kwai. And if you looked up the highest grossing films, you’d see the same. On the Waterfront. Marty. The Apartment. Etc. and if you took a gander on the Academy’s website (or wikipedia, which is probably just as accurate) you’d also find the same films were nominated time after time, year after year. Effectively, there was no difference. The popular films made the most money and were the most expensive art. They were nominated because they were the best. That way of doing business, of marketing art, of making art, changed in the late 1960s when Wall Street bought the Studios from the families that started them and gave control directly to the artists who made Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Star Wars, and Jaws. And in this fucked up world, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next wins best picture, not Star Wars. Which one do you think has the higher name recognition? Which one do you think has the higher gross? Which one do you think is better art (I know this is subjective, etc. come on!). When the 80’s came this rarely aligned. Raiders of the Lost Ark lost ot a film no one remembers. Literally, I don’t remember it. Raiders wasn’t even nominated for best picture. Neither was Back to the Future. Do you know what won best picture in 1994? I’ll give you a guess. It wasn’t Pulp Fiction.
The bent from popular films making huge money and earning huge awards slowly went down the drain until the Academy literally chose a film about Shakespeare to be best picture over Saving Private Ryan, a film that irrevocably changed action movies forever. Wes Anderson now has a better chance at winning an oscar than Steven Spielberg. And although I love Wes Anderson, I would never suggest he was anywhere close to Spielberg, and neither would he. The last two years of Academy winners has been severely skewed by the pandemic, so drawing conclusions is unfair, but if we take 2019, we can clearly see a divide. The top ten earners in that year were:
Avengers: Endgame
The Lion King
Toy Story 4
Frozen II
Captain Marvel
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Spider Man: Far From Home
Aladdin
Joker
It: Chapter Two
And for the films nominated for Best Picture, we have the enormously high regarded films that follow:
Parasite
Ford v. Ferrari
The Irishman
Jojo Rabbit
Joker
Little Women
Marriage Story
1917
Once Upon a Time In Hollywood
The winner for best actress, Renee Zellweger, starred in the biopic “Judy,” a film that arguably “nobody” saw, while conversely, Joaquin Phoenix won for Joker, a film that based on the evidence, almost everybody (who watches movies) saw. I could sit here and argue valid points or probably waste my breath on other points about how Avengers: Endgame is arguably a better film than Ford v Ferrari, that It: Chapter Two is arguably better that; Little Women or Marriage Story, but we are getting not into semantics, but what I said before about art being in the eye of the beholder. Despite those claims, I think we all know what we are talking about here, and it’s the academy deciding only one film that made it into the highest grossing films of the year deserved to be nominated for best picture. In fact there was only one other in the top 20 (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and still one other in the top 30 (Ford v. Ferrari). The next one, Little Women, is ranked as 72. So I do not think that I need to convince anyone who cares to read this rambling diatribe there is a divide between what the audience thinks is art and what the Academy does. And this goes right to the issue of the popular music category that was so briefly lived in 2018 when it was so glaringly obvious that Black Panther had an impact on the viewing public the voting academy could not understand and the organization of the academy could not plan for: the need to recognize this growing divide. The answer seemed so amazing and simple, I immediately was for it: The Grand Prix.
In Cannes, as well as in other film festivals, the Best Picture Category is divided into two voting structures. The first one is the Palm d’Or, which everyone says is the ‘best picture’ and the second one, the Grand Prix is for what people generally consider to be the best ‘art’ or ‘art-like’ film. In 2019, the Palm d’Or went to Parasite, which shocked no one. It was a shock in America, though where everyone thought the film that should have won was the dark comic book satire Joker. So the upset in America actually lined up with France. The Grand Prix went to Atlantic, an obscure film about the migration crises. The Grand Prix is thus. In that circumstance we could all acknowledge both Joker AND Parasite. Fewer people get pissed off, and more people decide to watch the Oscars the following year. 2011 is another classic case. Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life won the Palm d’Or in 2011 and two movies you never heard of won the Prix. Meanwhile, the Tree of Life was a serious contender for Best Picture in 2011’s Oscar race (It was beat out by The Artist, and even more obscure film which only proves my point). Meanwhile, the top ten grossing films that year was not an impressive year to be sure, but it did rank Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, a not unworthy choice for a split system. Other choices could have included Super 8 and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. This does seem like I am begging to include blockbuster films in the races to determine the year’s best films, and you would be right. Would I agree that Black Panther was the best film of 2018? No. But clearly there was enough groundswell behind that film in the academy membership to make that impossibiliity happen, but Academy rules simply prevent that from happening.
And here i am sorry to regurgitate something you probably already know which is the Academy is subdivided into voting blocks that do not get to vote outside their category. For the technical fields such as sound design or even cinematography, this makes sense. No one in costume design is going to want anyone in ADR deciding who made a better costume. Film Editors vote for film editing, and so on. This makes complete sense. Unfortunately that also means directors only vote for directing and producers only vote for best picture. If the Academy is going to continue to limit the awards to what is in some cases, only a few hundred people, then they need to find a way to open up the mass of voting members to choose a popular category. Thus, the Grand Prix.
Don’t get me wrong, Michael Bay sucks, and James Cameron’s Ouvre after True Lies remains to be remarkably mediocre in terms of narrative storytelling, but I will say one thing about even the huge films that I hate: the production quality cannot be touched, even if the story sucks. With the Grand Prix it is entirely possible to recognize the team that made such mammoth projects like Logan or Thor: Ragnarok, which are legitimately important and interesting films that tell a compelling story about human nature but will never be victimized by being included in the Best Picture category. In this case, Mad Max Fury Road, which was famously nominated in 2015 but which had no real way of winning despite its very art house themes and tropes.
This is becoming ever more important in an age in which the huge blockbuster films are getting less and less respect for being ‘sellouts’ or being ‘popular,’ Scorsese and Coppola are in the vanguard of criticism, but behind them are scores of elitist film makers (and critics) who continue on an anti-cape crusade to distinguish what they do (and what wins) from what other people do, which is namely to make money. This is at the heart of the LaLa Land experience.
And let’s face it, four pages into a review on LaLa Land, let’s deep dive into this amazing and complicated film that serves as this kind of parallel to the idea that there are art films and there are commercial films and there is not much in between. If that is the case, then I don’t know what LaLa Land is, because I see elements of both.
LaLa land is special because it straddles this idea that art films and commercial films are separate. Consider the opening, in which it seems a hundred people are in at least a hundred cars stuck in traffic on a flyover headed to downtown Los Angeles on a somewhat clear day doing a song and dance routine of Another Day of Sun. Effectively, there is no difference between this and West Side Story or My Fair Lady or (my personal favorite opening number) Sit Down John from 1776. The choreography, a complicated mix of in between and on top of cars exhibits a thoroughly American experience, complete with jaw dropping camera boom movement which could only have been accomplished with what appears to me to be seamless and hard to catch computer generated images in the background. Having thoroughly pushed you into old Hollywood, the film then entrances you with numbers like A Lovely Night which displays the two leads as akin to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in The Gay Divorcee or Shall We Dance, complete with an unbroken steady cam that showcases the actors’ unbelievable talent for rote memorization and execution of what seems to my amateurish eyes to be fairly complex and for me unachievable choreography.
But alas, there are two very important scenes which betray the Old Hollywood and firmly place the film as one musical made after 1970: The dinner break up scene and the City of Stars finale, which is the nail in the coffin so to speak. The evolution of the dinner breakup condenses everything about complex human emotions regarding work and personal life between two people so well that it honest to goodness made me think about Orson Welle’s famous breakfast table montage from Citizen Kane. In five minutes, their relationship was seemingly over, and the smoking ruin of what used to be their love was the burnt roast in the oven. This scene is so good it defies logic, and I’m not sure just any combination of modern actors in this age group could have pulled this off. The ramp up of emotions every thirty seconds was so fascinating, I watched it twice. Not the finale. Not the dream sequence. I watched the argument twice. It said so many things about human nature, and how we humans react in these circumstances when we are so involved with our partner, seemingly inside a bubble of what we thought was trust. It was fascinating. I wrote them both off as pretty people years ago. I was so wrong about both of them. They are fine actors, through and through, the best of their generation.
The fight centered around the ticking time bomb which was Seb’s (Ryan Gosling) stuck up, arrogant, bullshit view about being a purist jazz musician. The instant he appeared on screen running though jazz tunes on his radio because he couldn’t stand to listen to anything other than what he considered to be perfect music, I had this cocksucker nailed. I know you. The one who thinks Metallica betrayed their fanbase when they put out the Black Album. The ones who shit a brick when Eric Clapton raked in money for After Midnight. You probably are the same people who never heard of Tegan and Sarah until they went Gold in Canada for the first time after ten years and five albums and called them sell outs. Being a musician is like any other job in the world. You get paid for someone to do a fucking job. Do your fucking job. It doesn’t matter who pays you or what you think of them. And as an artist, if they don’t like you, a consumer can just choose not to buy your art. That’s how this shit works. So after Mia so hilariously emoted A Flock of Seagulls’ I Ran (So Far Away) at the pool party (I was in STITCHES) of course Seb said a bullshit line like “I can’t believe you would request such a song from a serious musician.” “Serious musician?” What a fucking asshole to say something like that to Mike Score. What are the the chances of Sebastian whatisname being known other than “that guy who plays keys for the dude who looks EXACTLY like John Legend?” Vs. Flock of Seagulls? You’re nothing next to Mike Score, douchebag. You should be lucky to write a song that has been handed down through history with such pop culture impact. At the time of writing of this blog, I’ve checked on Wikipedia and I still don’t see Sebastian charting… or recording… anything. Maybe he’s running a jazz bar in a fucking basement in west L.A. somewhere.You know, the kind with cheap neon signs? If I were as bad at my job as Seb was at his, I’d probably be in the same place. I have a huge issue with the idea of ‘selling out’ when it means it raises your standard of living.
At the same time, Mia has a legitimate grievance when she finds out that the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with is going to be gone 200 nights a year. RUSH was on the road for seven straight years, pausing only to record records, usually within a few days. Look at Journey’s tour record. It will shock you.So for her to bring that up, totally on point. For her to pair that with her criticism of him not following his dream - well that was going for the testicles. He had ‘sold out’ and then she called him out for ‘selling out,’ which is total cock. Maybe I should go back to delivering pizzas for pennies in the poorest suburbs of Houston. Or maybe I should have stayed an underpaid school teacher in the slums? As it happens I liked not living slightly above squallor. So fuck that attitude. It was a total attack, and I don’t know what she was intending to gain from it, because it netted her nothing and lost her everything. And let me tell you something, I’ve been in those situations and I’ve had those conversations, and there is nothing to gain from them. There was no way for Seb to get out of that dinner unscathed. Whether she planned it or not, that topic was a trap, designed to destroy what they had, and as women are more experts in relationships, I quite frankly expected more from her. But then you wouldn’t have a movie to watch or this blog, right?
Mia’s experience as an actor is a debilitating, depressing experience for hundreds of thousands of women trying to make their way as an artist in a very uncaring, numbers driven, and sometimes hostile industry which is orientated to using them until the age of twenty-six before breaking and discarding them for the next hot best thing. Why someone would want to subject themselves to such crushing criticism and unfairness must be the most soul crushing experience. Emma’ Stone’s performance as Mia in the casting office near the beginning of the film shows what a talent she, or Miss Stone, is. The idea of someone looking at their phone instead of someone they deliberately contacted for input is insulting and dispiriting. I understand that casting agents see hundreds of actors, sometimes in a day and giving 100% attention is difficult. But all of those called actors deserve respect and attention. Though the chance of becoming a professional film actor is quite remote, it actually has increased the past few years with the surge of competing streaming platforms. This is the best chance to be an actor in Hollywood since the thirties, when it was about 1 in 65. By the 90’s it was in the thousands and it has dropped a bit since then but you are still looking at an uphill battle unless you have a noteworthy item on your resume like a local television appearance or you just happened to fuck Harvey Weinstien. Those options being eliminated though, Mia had to compete on talent alone when no one would pay any attention to her talent, which was considerable, and watching her fail was heartbreaking.
When you don’t succeed at anything huge, it is really important that you succeed at anything small, and for Mia it was this one person play she put on basically for her friends in which she described her life. As brilliant as it must have been, we did not see it (but some studio executive obviously did) but as it happened the only person who actually had to be there was Seb, who flubbed up his schedule and missed it. My wife launched all over this obvious loophole. One: just tell her you can’t make it beforehand, via cell phones, Two, tell her after the fact what happened. Three: ritual suicide. What I tried to explain to my wife was this was a no-go in any confrontation. There was no way Seb could talk his way out of this one. First, he should have been there. He either should have kept a better schedule on his iphone (artists are infamously meticulous about their schedules) or he should have just coughed up to John legend: “hey, can we do my shit first…I have to be there for Mia.” Or in the worst case scenario, he could have said “Shit, I’m sorry. I can’t.” and just left. But then there would be a happy ending and we just can’t have that in this modern musical (Which I willo get to by the end, I promise, if I actually do get to finish this fucking article). As my wife pondered these many things, I did in fact lament the fact that the only use of a cell phone in this film was when it was used against the characters, never for them. But effectively, I told my wife, this was the Kobayashi Maru of this relationship. For Seb, it was a no-win scenario. Since he did not plan, and did not react, there was no getting out of it. NMy wife’s assertion that he should have just explained to her after the performance why he could not make it, is as improbable as any other scenario. There are some arguments, that you just cannot win, and it does not matter what evidence you have. Tony Soprano was caught with a strippers fingernail in his pocket that his wife found with his keys when she was doing the laundry. When she confronted him about cheating on her, which Tony was not doing (at the time) she brought up the fingernail. Tony, we all know, got the fingernail by cleaning up evidence from a stripper that one of his soldiers had killed in the Bada Bing. So he wasn’t about to tell his wife He wasn’t fucking a stripper, he was just burying them in the Jersey forests. Let’s get real here. There was no way to win that argument. I’m convinced this is why most women think that men are way more stupid than they actually are. Because men know better than to say “I didn’t make it to the game not because I had to just have one more beer but because Bill had his testical pierced by a stiletto from one of the strippers and we had to take him to the ER. That’s the type of shit I’m talking about.
My wife likened LaLa Land to being 90% good, and I instantly saw her point. She wanted them to get back together at the end like all the old Hollywood musicals and because they didn’t, well, that’s it. She’s done with it. I, on the other hand, loved the ending, Because anyone who has those contradictions in themselves as these two do, is doomed to failure. They were never meant to be together. Now, she doesn’t have to marry and have a kid with some nameless dude who probably works ‘below the line’ as a grip or something on her first film like a lot of annulled marriages in Hollywood start (it would have been real funny or more appropriate if you recognized the actor. Like maybe Brad Pitt or Jake Gyllenhaal), but the fact that she was with someone who CLEARLY was not NEARLY as attractive as Ryan Gosling in terms of screen presence, well, that did not say a lot for her either.) Judging by her child's age and the time frame involved, this was one of those relationships - it’s not going to last. Despite the fact that if it were not for him, she wouyldn’t have her career and if it were not for the breakup, he wouldn’t either. Sometimes winning or losing everything you have is enough to make you sacrifice everything to get the one elusive element in your life. But if she was going to go live in Paris for a year and make buckets of money, and he was going to go 9on tour ofr almost a year, then what difference did it make. I’d fucking love it if my wife had a job that paid both of our bills in Paris for a year. I’d do nothing bur write stupid, long, uninteresting critiques like this all day, everyday. Fuck my tendonitis. That’s what French universal healthcare is for. So why he did not go with her is pretty stupid.
The irony of the situation is of course that they both get what they want - just not each other. She becomes a well known movie star and he owns his own jazz nightclub. But they do not live happily ever after. And this irritates the hell out of my wife. Why, she asked, did Hollywood bother making a hollywood musical complete with jaw dropping song and dance numbers, with music that was actually listen-in-your-car-good, if they did not pair them together in the end? Where is the happy ending? Where did you go, Joe DiMaggio? And of course, the long winded hour and a half answer that I had to my wife over that was something to have recorded so I could make this piece of shit review even longer. Because effectively, it’s the audience’s fault.
You heard me. You decided to stay home three nights a week in the ‘50’s when you bought a television set and when you got a color one ten years later, you decided not to go four nights a week. By the late 1970’s, you went to the theater twice a month. This coincided with the studio heads retiring or dying, like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer. The response by the New York companies who owned the studios was to just sell them to junk bond holding companies. These assholes didn’t know art from a pothole in Fifth Avenue, so instead of trying to find talented producers like Robert Evans who obviously didn’t grow on trees, they just decided to give the money straight to the filmmakers themselves. This was the birth of American Zoetrope. Lucasfilm. Lion’s Gate. The result was a more realistic cinema, as these new filmmakers came to be after the fall of the Production Code. Criminals didn’t have to pay for their crimes (The Godfather). Sin could be rewarded (MASH). Endings could be ambiguous (Taxi Driver). Sex was and violence were more graphic (Last Tango in Paris, Taxi Driver).
But while the auteurs possibly saved cinema as an art form, they did not do it any favors in the audience department. When cable TV came in the late seventies, and home rentals in the early 80’s, and with the advent of DVD in the 90’s, there was less and less reason to go to the theater decade by decade, and by the turn of the century it was at an all time (fully a century of all time) low. Streaming is largely thought to have been the nail in the coffin, but people needed to be held back from the cinema, and that wound up being the pandemic. Whether or not the theaters can survive without Hollywood superhero super budget films remains to be seen, but the trend is there. Popular films love happy endings…or do they (Infinity War, Endgame)? Happiness now comes with a price, and since the auteur era, that price has steadily risen. It might be that your hero dies (Tony Stark) or it might be the love of your life moves to Paris, doesn’t invite you, and marries some stud who has no business being with her just because he knows who to call for craft services. This is a long winded attempt to explain to you why Seb gets what he wants (his jazz bar) and Mia gets what she wants (a career in Hollywood that may or may not require her to bare her breasts that get captured on PornHub forever), and yet both of them are unhappy.
My personal take after the credits it she is going to be torn, re-establish contact, and fuck him on the side until her husband / producer finds out. Then a nasty custody battle takes place, involving lots of thrown awards, beaches across the south pacific, and at least one 90-day stint into a drug rehab. In fact, there might be one overdose, three podcast interviews, and at least once episode in which that bitch Nancy Grace pontificates over ‘doucebag Seb’s’ real purpose in playing jazz and being with Mia. I mean, who does he think he is anyway? Then, after all that, at least two more kids, Mia and Seb separate after a HUGE argument on a learjet discussing the royalties of the winery they share together. After an uncomfortable weekend in Malibu, Mia decides to take the kids to New York, and Seb cries over an alcohol induced all-nighter at the club in which he drops dead. Credits. If this is too harsh for you, then he takes the kids to Maui and she overdoses from cocaine in New York. Credits. Now that is a REAL Hollywood ending.