Archive for January 30th, 2017

La La Land

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, J. K. Simmons, Finn Wittrock, Rosemarie DeWitt, John Legend, Josh Pence

After the success of Whiplash, writer and director Damien Chazelle achieves the virtually impossible, a magnificent and dazzling modern day musical set in Los Angeles which is fresh, original and utterly captivating. La La Land pairs two of Hollywood’s hottest stars the dapper and ever charming Ryan Gosling (The Nice Guys, The Big Short) with the quirky and talented Emma Stone (Magic in the Moonlight) in one of the best on screen pairings ever seen on film.

La La Land is superb, a gorgeous brightly coloured ode to all those that have ever dreamed, that have harboured artistic expression, to those that have repeatedly been told to relentlessly follow your dreams. If you are talented and passionate then they will come true. But like all dreams, however magical there is always a price to pay.

Unashamedly, La La Land is also a tribute to Los Angeles, a glorious picture perfect film to all the major attractions of the magical city of stars where dreams come to be realized or dashed, where glamour is epitomized, where everyone wants to sing and dance and act on film.

La La Land sets the tone for a lavish musical, with the opening number starting as a traffic jam on one of the city’s major highways transforming into an extraordinary sing and dance number. Soon Mia an aspiring actress played with relish and nuance by Oscar nominee Emma Stone (Birdman) surrounded by a bevy of beautiful flat mates unexpectedly meets Sebastian a jazz-obsessed pianist whose dreams entwine in a seasonal musical which pays homage to Casablanca and Singing in the Rain.

Chazelle’s directorial style pays tribute to auteurs such as Robert Altman, David Lynch and Pedro Almodovar and his superb sense of timing is matched by his brilliant screenplay especially in the romantic scenes between Mia and Sebastian as they both embark on a romantic affair which is impulsive and beautiful from their first date watching Rebel without a Cause at the Rialto to their dancing under the stars at the iconic Griffin Observatory.

With an original score by Justin Hurwitz and some catchy tunes like City of Stars, La La Land will captivate audiences with its fanciful colours, its bold delight at music and refusal not to become too serious. In fact, La La Land is simply masterful in every way from the beautiful costumes mostly in primary colours to the fabulous production design, this film is like a tonic for everything cruel and horrible that is happening in the world.

Like a cinematic soufflé, La La Land hits all the right notes made all the more poignant by the fantastic performances by Gosling and Stone assisted with some wonderful cameo’s by John Legend, Rosemarie DeWitt and Oscar winner J. K. Simmons (Whiplash).

La La Land is the third collaboration of Stone and Gosling after Crazy, Stupid, Love and Gangster Squad and clearly this Hollywood chemistry is working judging by all the critical acclaim.

This is cinema at its best. La La Land is utterly phenomenal, a marvellous musical which is just what audiences are longing for: a visually spectacular tribute to the dreamers which makes living purely inspirational.

Allied

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, August Diehl, Lizzy Caplan, Marion Bailey, Matthew Goode, Simon McBurney, Josh Dylan

Flight director Robert Zemeckis’s hopes to rekindle the World War II genre with the Nazi thriller Allied pairing Oscar nominee Brad Pitt (Twelve Monkeys, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Oscar winner Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose) are severely dashed.

Whilst Cotillard holds her own as femme fatale Marianne Beausejour speaking French in the stunning Moroccan opening sequence, it is Brad Pitt who looks forlorn as the flaky Canadian spy Max Vatan as he parachutes into the Sahara desert to enter an intriguing plot in Casablanca to assassinate the Nazi German ambassador to the Vichy occupied French Morocco.

The most engaging sequences in Allied is the first act, all set in exotic Morocco, but if the film is aiming to recapture the allure of Anthony Minghella’s Oscar winning masterpiece The English Patient, it falls short of the mark. Despite a competent script by Steven Knight although not his best work (Eastern Promises, Locke), Allied fails to deliver as a riveting war drama mainly due to the surprising lack of screen chemistry between Pitt and Cotillard.

Unlike in director David Ayer’s blood-soaked Fury, Brad Pitt wasn’t on his best acting form, pre-empting the drama of the Brangelina breakup which overshadowed the post-production publicity of Allied to such an extent that Marion Cotillard had to issue a press statement denying that she was the cause of the split between Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Publicity aside, the second half of Allied set in rain-drenched London during the Blitz is far more dreary than its spectacular opening sequence despite a strong group of British supporting actors including Jared Harris (Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), Matthew Goode (Brideshead Revisited, Stoker), Marion Bailey (Mr Turner) and Simon McBurney (Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, The Last King of Scotland).

Audiences should look out for two superb cameos by German actor August Diehl as the Nazi commander Hobar who incidentally also acted with Pitt in Tarantino’s revisionist war drama Inglourious Basterds and Lizzy Caplan (The Interview) as Max’s bohemian sister Bridget.

As Max Vatan and the mysterious Marianne Beausejour marry and set up home in Hampstead during the war, there are rumours circulating that Beausejour is a double agent, secretly working for the Nazi’s and that the entire Casablanca affair was a ruse to get Vatan to trust her. As Marianne states in the opening scenes, “I keep my emotions real. That’s why it works” which beguiles Max into falling in love with the sophisticated yet steely eyed Frenchwoman.

Whilst Allied is an engaging film in the first half, with stylish 1940’s costume to match, the second half fails to keep the audience interested and develops into a slightly soppy second half as the truth emerges.

Allied is an average war drama from a screenwriter that could have delivered far better and from two stars that required a more dynamic plot to compensate for their dismal lack of onscreen chemistry.