What it feels like

Rating: 9/10 (2 June 2018)

La La Land is a special movie, and Damien Chazelle is to be congratulated for creating it. Each musical number is in some way an homage to a different previous type of Hollywood musical style. More significant, though, is the way this love story captures the progression of sensations experienced when you are simultaneously concerned about ambition/achievement and about love. The one criticism I've heard of the movie is that it's "not realistic." Really? Not realistic to have hundreds of people dancing and singing during a freeway stoppage? Who knew? The movie isn't trying to achieve realism; its artifices are transparent.. The point is to represent and, maybe more importantly, evoke in the audience the emotional moments that can occur during the trajectories of two sometimes intertwined, sometimes contradictory life goals: the desire for achievement and the desire for love.