A poor attempt to capture the essence of earlier musicals

Rating: 4/10 (23 February 2019)

I should say that I stopped watching after one hour. That was enough. The film still hadn't started. Apart from the fact that the music is mediocre, the real problem lies in the lack of authenticity of the characters. She is supposed to be a down on her luck actress and he is a down on his luck jazz pianist. The trouble is, they fail to portray this vulnerability because there is none of it to portray. If you think about Billy Bigelow in Carousel, he puffs himself up and puts on veneer of bravado because underneath he believes he's a nobody. In the end, this is his undoing. In La La Land, the two main characters are Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling (rather than the characters they are supposed to be portraying). I don't buy into the characters at all. She lives in a nice place. They both have cars. They go to nice places if they want to. There is no sense of feeling disenfranchised or smashed by life. There are no songs anything remotely like "If I loved you", "Feed the birds", "The sound of music". High school musical is way better.