Spoiling the predictable

Rating: 4/10 (11 January 2017)

This film didn't fool me. For a minute I felt like I was watching a tourist promo spot. Traffic, Stanley Donen's street dancing, even skaters that projected how cliché Hollywood falls when it no longer can teach the world how to live, think... Decades ago, through movies Americans saw the world through a peephole and now it revives it with Cinemascope and predictable dialogues. Banking this time on the simplicity of "selling the dream" paradigm. The unsung jazz pianist struggling to be reckoned with. An aspiring actress working as a barista beating the audition circuit. They used to fill in as waitresses or party musicians,working in obscurity, yet still in awe, revering showbiz and stardom as their lives' goal. Not much has changed from the day when studios used to capitalize on similar scripts selling glitzy but deluding rags to riches stories.
This movie was much needed to the Hollywood crowd. Hence all those overrated accolades and much hype. This film was promoted and marketed to add on the collective auto-suggestion and make them feel that showbiz is the ultimate quest of them all. It's an ego booster to feed the masses that they should keep dreaming, quit school, college or other utilitarian goals and move to Hollywood land to pursue an infinitesimal share of the vast wealth of the industry which equates to a mere 1% of what the movie distributors and production companies rake in selling movie tickets and later DVD sales.
However, I didn't have to go to the movies and contribute to that 1%. To get the gist of it, I streamed the film and FFW through the musical parts to skip the commercial overload in the hopes that I could extract net dramatic quality. Performances were superb but the script/story failed us all. I hope members of the Academy and SAG/non-SAG actors can see how detached the film was to the real life of a struggling performer who will never taste notoriety or come even close to make it big in this town. A salutary warning to those who still dream big and must face the sad reality that 99.5% of their guild are still waiting for that call back or a friend of a friend to pull them up on the main stage. Trying to depart from the original mission of enlightening the way to an already pre-convinced (sold) audience, the producers can't hide behind the "telling the story" excuse. Instead they should admit they were just selling us the 6th St Bridge. Hollywood ain't paved with gold.