La La Land frontrunner in 2017 Golden Globes
La La Land is an unforgettable love story — but not the kind you might expect.
In the movie, Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) sing and dance their way into a romantic musical, but the tale of Mia and Sebastian and their struggle to balance their love and their dreams is the core of La La
Land’s appeal. The movie follows Sebastian, a musician, and Mia, an actress, as they try to make it big. Their courtship is fun to watch, but their quest to succeed in their careers is the main event.
After Mia and Sebastian’s romance unfolds, it gets more melancholy and starts to ache when both characters become more passionate about their work than anything else. Mia and Sebastian’s story ultimately becomes one of bad timing, growing more and more painful as that fact comes into focus.
The struggle to balance their love for each other and their love for their work is a constant clash throughout La La
Land. While in love, they are also deeply committed to their own professions. The question posed by La La Land is: Can they have it all?
This is why La La Land, though nostalgic, is actually a modern kind of love story. It tells of driven individuals who are torn between love and career. For viewers who never let themselves pursue those career passions, La La
Land will make you think about the one that got away, jobwise.
For all of their singing and dancing, Sebastian and Mia are just like every member of the audience. They live, hope and dream in a contemporary world just like ours, and they have to contend with the very same heartbreak that we cope with on an everyday basis.
It’s not just the chemistry between Ryan and Emma’s characters that you’ll want to hold on to as you walk out of the theater, it’s the love story between the characters and their careers.
La La Land features original songs sung by Emma, Ryan and John Legend. It currently leads with seven Golden Globes nominations including Best Picture for musical or comedy and is predicted to win it.
*** From the recently announced Golden Globe Awards nominees, La La Land’s nominations include Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy, Ryan for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy), Emma for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy), Damien Chazelle as Best Director for a Motion Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Original Score and Best Original Song.
Both an ode to the glamour and emotion of cinema classics, a love letter to the Los Angeles of unabated dreams, and a distinctly modern romance, La La
Land reunites Ryan and Emma, bringing them together with rising writer/ director Damien (the Oscar-winning
Whiplash). The film begins as everything begins in L.A.: on the freeway. This is where Sebastian meets Mia, with a disdainful honk in a traffic jam that mirrors all too well the gridlock they’re each navigating in their lives. Both are focused on the kind of near-impossible hopes that are the lifeblood of the city: Sebastian trying to get people to care about traditional jazz in the 21st Century, Mia aiming to nail just one uninterrupted audition. But neither expects that their fateful encounter will lead them to take leaps they never could do alone.
Wearing its influences on its sleeve yet taking considerable risks, La La Land allows filmmaker Chazelle to pay homage to legends of cinema while harnessing its current power to make the most private human terrain — the territory of intimate relationships, personal dreams and the crossroads where decisions set fate into motion — come to life on the screen as a palpably real, yet enchanted, universe.
As it turned out, Ryan had his own long-held affection for movie musicals that came into play the minute he came aboard. Says Ryan: “I was really intrigued by the fact that Damien wanted to make a film in the style of that Fred and Ginger and Gene Kelly eras, because those are the musicals that move me. The fact that he wanted this film to have that kind of aesthetic and spirit of playfulness was fantastic because it was also a secret wish of mine to make a film like that.”
Early on in the process, Emma met with Chazelle, who took her through his ideas for some of the musical num-
bers. “It was intoxicating,” Emma recalls. “The idea of telling this really modern story of two struggling artists —but in a ’50s-style musical version of today’s Los Angeles — became something really exciting to me very quickly.”
Mia’s yearning for something beyond the ordinary also hit home with her. “Mia is driven by something that maybe she doesn’t completely understand,” says Emma. “She wants to be an artist in a city of so many people who seem to be just like her. She feels that there’s something special inside her but she doesn’t quite know what it is. I could relate to her being an actress and going on auditions but even more so, there was something so exciting about taking her into this musical world where you can suddenly spin down the street or burst into song. That was a wonderful challenge.”
La La Land opens Jan. 11 in cinemas nationwide from Pioneer Films.