Wacky Comedy about La La Land

Rating: 1/10 (22 March 2006)

And I mean to say it's about a fantasy world. I've never been to LA but I can't believe a major metropolis like the one in this movie exists in this universe or even in an evil parallel universe. The reason I describe it as a comedy is that it became that for me. Because very early in the film there are several moments that are so nonsensical that it kept taking me out of the movie. And once you begin to look at this movie sideways the whole thing becomes funny.
The first instance that I'm speaking about involves Brendan Fraser's character. (By the way, there is no way I'm going to use the character names because you don't get to know them enough to ever remember them. At best this movie is a '100 most racially motivated moments' countdown). So Brendan is some kind of politician and he's speaking to his handlers about how to spin something that has happened to him. He makes a suggestion and within the same minute finds that it is a bad suggestion, and tells his underling to 'give himself a raise for that one' as if he wasn't the one who made the suggestion in the first place. No one does that. Bosses blame their workers for all kinds of mistakes that they make but not something that he just said within the same minute. I must have missed the next 3 lines of dialogue because I was thinking about how silly that was.
Later there is a scene with Matt Dillon and Loretta Divine. I've seen bits and pieces of it on TV shows as a promotional clip. In context, it's awful. Matt is being very friendly with her as he's hoping to find a solution with her to his father's medical/insurance problems. And then he suddenly turns on a dime and starts spouting his issues with Affirmative Action. I'm not even sure if he took a breath. Nobody does that. Ever.
Ludicrous and Larenz Tate. First off Larenz Tate is one of the better journeyman actors in this movie and the fact that he had to take a role where he basically plays sounding board meant solely to respond to Ludicrous, who up until now has been a rap artist, and to eventually be a bull's-eye, makes me sad. After being in the business for as long as he has he should have the Ludicrous role. But he didn't have the instant fanbase that Ludicrous has, I guess. So anyway, the "China-man" under the car. What was that? "China-man" sounds like a superhero who saves expensive dishware. That scene played as though it was meant to be comedic. Scary.
It all ended for me with the scene involving Don Cheadle and William Fichtner. Fichtner begins and ends a conversation with Don Cheadle with the question "--expletive-- black people, huh?" Yes, that expletive. And from there on in, I couldn't stop laughing. No one talks like that. Ever. I don't know how he got it out. He knows he'd never say that to a black person. And he knows he's never met anyone who would do that. And between the bookend questions he used the word "black" about 89 times. Ridiculous. One day in the future Don Cheadle is going to sit down and watch this movie and see how racist it really is. Not that it's showing us racist people, that it is racist.
So then wackiness ensues as Terrence Howard winds up in a car chase and does probably the stupidest thing any character in any movie has ever done, when he gets out of the car packing a gun and screaming insanities at a cop who is trying to stop him from getting shot. None of that makes any sense either but the moment when I fell out of my chair involves a Persian guy who hates buying doors and a little girl with a magic cloak. Remember in Pulp Fiction when God changed Coke to Pepsi? Well He's up to His Old Tricks again. Which I guess was an attempt to make the most predictable shooting in movie history unpredictable at the last minute. Awful.
The piece de resistance. When that women started running into the hospital screaming "Choi Jin Gui! Choi Jin Gui!" I thought to myself "oh please let 'China-man' be her husband, Larenz Tate being Don Cheadle's baby brother wasn't poetic enough" Wouldn't you know it? The gods of cinema fulfilled my request. *tear* And the best part? Her name was Kim Lee. KIM LEE. Amazing.
This movie was bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. I did my best to give it a fair shake, but it wouldn't let me. It was unrealistic, the dialogue was atrocious, and a lot of the acting was sub par. And the final scenes were blatantly mooning the makers of Magnolia. Saying "Look, we made a really bad version of your movie and we're going to prove how unoriginal we are by doing our own sad version of the "Wise Up" scene but to play off that we're not, our actors won't sing. :P And the best part is we attached racism to it, so it'll get all kinds of praise it doesn't deserve."
As I said before at the very best it's a wacky comedy, at the very worst it's Best Picture as deemed by AMPAS. I don't know what they were thinking, if they were thinking. All I can do is laugh about the whole thing. But I do recommend that everyone see it, just to have their own opinion of it. I would never expect anyone to believe a review this one-sided, so please see it for yourself. But I promise you, these were my honest thoughts while watching this movie.