Charm and guts

Rating: Null/10 (14 June 2017)

I saw LaLa Land in a real movie theater with a huge screen: it grabbed me from the first scene. That freeway dancing/singing opening scene is pure magic. To all the naysayers who did not find meat in this movie and complain about the lack of dancing skills from Gosling and Stone, I say: expert dancing and singing are irrelevant to the tale here. The relevance here is good music and a smart script, and... let them dance and sing it! The movie brought to my mind not Ginger and Fred and Gene and Cyd (this was clearly not the director's intention) but a French movie called "The Young Girls of Rochefort" (1967, director Jacques Demy) where an older Gene Kelly makes a small but glorious appearance, and everyone else in the cast dances no better than you and me, but what a crazy delight it is. Just like in LaLa Land, the viewer is grabbed by lyrical tunes and invited to take a swirl into fantasy...while grounded in reality.