Alright but don't believe the hype

Rating: 6/10 (14 July 2017)

I'm not particularly into musicals, but when done well, they can probe into an area of enjoyment that regular films don't bother with.
This movie does not do that, not at all. It's almost as if some amateur theatre troupe discovered a suitcase of money and decided to spend it on their life's dream: hiring some Hollywood heavies to shine-up their B-grade overworked musical romp. The movie looks good, it moves nicely, editing is fine... all the hallmarks of money spent getting pros to do professional work.
None of it saves the cringe-worthy opening, the unexpected and unexplained changes in personality of the characters, nor the general feeling of algorithm-driven movie construction (insert jazzy swing number here).
La La Land starts out musical-heavy, singing and single-take popping it's way through several muffled numbers, until after about 20 mins I began to start forming the words in my head: "this movie isn't for me honey, I'm going to go do something else".
Clearly someone with contacts had conned their good friends in the media to spread the word: pure awesome clean fun had been condensed into a two-hour chocolate bar. But the lyrics were machine-gunned out, the songs boiled out like coke poured onto hot concrete and every side character looked like they were trying to over perform with their 2 minutes screen time.
But I stuck with it and held a sort of scrunched face grimace on my dial through Stone and Gosling dancy-dancing their way around an LA hilltop ("look Ma they teached me to dance good"). Check it out fools: we've got chemistry, listen to the foot scrapes and our near-synchronisation. I know next to nothing about dancing but it reeked of average-skilled people trying really hard to emulate things they've been taught, like the way you feel when a picture-perfect CGI character starts awkwardly moving their lips. Like an uncanny valley of dance instruction.
Then abruptly, the musical push fades, Gosling's character stops being a douche and Emma Stone becomes 3D. And then I actually started to enjoy myself. OK so we find out very late in the piece that she already has a boyfriend, but what the heck, he's a big-haired vain suit and she evidently can't stop thinking about the permanently squinting unshaven skinny white jazz enthusiast who opened with road rage, but captured her heart with a bit of careful stalking.
It gets almost good - I'm non-convinced of Stone's character ever having a chance of "making it", but Gosling's pianist-with-old-school-values almost starts to work. The John Legend bit works. Their early love works.
Then... |insert here: well-meaning love gesture that ends in an epic argument|. Back to algorithms, he sells out, she criticises him for not following his dream, he understandably gets upset says unreasonably dumb things, it's immediately non-reconcilable. He puts on a Kevin Federline outfit and does a photo shoot, missing Emma's one-shot fragile heart output to an audience of 10 (wait are they here one-dimensional friends in the crowd? Gee guys were have you been?) She breaks up, runs off home, he goes back to being a douche. No wait! Her show was a success, one of the ten was a power-hitter, they invite her to audition and she ad-libs a song under the notes "emulate Anne Hathaway". The movie falls away.
At times I quite liked it, the ending is fine, but there are huge holes all through the middle and for me, almost all the song and dance parts just don't work. Like so many people have said, get properly skilled people to do this, not well-known actors who try really hard whilst ultimately failing.
Not the worst movie I've seen, the 1-star reviews are excessively harsh, but anyone who rates this a 10 has, for me, been fooled by the media and awards hype.