La la la la la la la

Rating: 10/10 (4 April 2017)

Those who have seen the film will recognize my review title as the theme song. I don't really know what to write about the film, except that I fell in love with it after about half an hour, and I can't put my finger on why. And not being able to set your finger on it may just be a quality that surpasses so many other more verbalizable qualities. Well, the acting was top notch, the story touching and sweet in the best possible sense, the dialogue funny, the musical numbers did not seem out of place (as one might have feared), and if Gosling doesn't have the greatest singing voice ever, he has the ability to make it work to perfection anyway, sort of like the young James Stewart when he soldiered through Cole Porter's "Easy to Love." As for the ending – well, I cried. I don't mind admitting it. Or, yes I do, but I admit it anyway. And I'm an old and unsentimental guy, not unlike Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge, but I did shed a tear. It was when that "la-la-la-la-la-la-la" started again near the end as one might have expected it would, and on came the waterworks. It's funny how movies can make us completely sentimental about things we get so quickly over in real life.