Not even a good musical

Rating: 3/10 (16 January 2017)

Come on people, step back a bit and get some perspective on this show – put aside the Hollywood hype. The story here – trying to make it big in LA – has been done a million times and this attempt failed to show us anything new. I respect Ryan Gosling as an actor; I think he has great range and has shown this in many vastly differing roles (Drive, The Big Short, Crazy Stupid Love, The Place Beyond the Pines, Gangster Squad, Lars and the Real Girl, Fracture), but he is not a song and dance man. Emma Stone is a competent actor; I've never seen her do anything badly, but nothing that would promote her to my A list, and she should leave song and dance alone as well. Even the fantasy scenes were nothing new or special. I thought the ending was something new and very well done, but that's about it. The story, boring and ordinary, was presented at a snail's pace (I overheard someone near me, in a packed theater by the way, say, "Oh, come on, get on with it.")
If you want to see a real musical, dig through your old DVDs for "Cabaret" and "Sweet Charity", both musicals that owe nothing to anything that came before and stand as living tributes to the genius of Bob Fosse.
I'm not listening to the Hollywood hype and marking this at a 3 (barely worth watching on DVD).