Some of the hardest things to explain to children—and by extension adults—are the stupefying incongruities of life. Having no children of my own (bless up!) I can only guess at it, but spending a few hours here and there as deadbeat uncle and/or much-older-half-brother, I catch the occasional glimpse. Light, dark, asleep, awake, yes, no; it’s easy to see how the binary can posses the developing mind. But as life continues to reveal itself, the thresher of complexity will invariably rear its nuanced jaws, and then what? A Monster Calls embraces this cusp in a young man’s life and manages an honest answer to this difficult question: it’s complicated.
 
As a piece of filmmaking, A Monster Calls is a little shaggy. It’s really quite plodding out of the gates, and a dour tone is omnipresent. Stylistically, the picture occasionally reaches for some naturalistic flourishes, but, as opposed to adding a lyrical touch, it’s almost like you can see the stitching on the film: odd stray shots, clumsy out of focus images, a less-than-remarkable score. But the emotional power of the film is unquestionable.

When my editor first sent out the notice for this screening, she appended a brief note, “You’ll cry buckets.” And she’s not wrong. [Editor's Note: I saw this at Fantastic Fest by myself and openly sobbed.] Usually commentary like “not a dry eye in the house” is a bit hyperbolic for my tastes, but unless there was a collective allergy attack in the theater, everyone around me was visibly moved. This film is very personally resonant for me—one moment in particular was seemingly plucked verbatim from one of my life-defining traumas—but we can only wait and see if the film will jerk tears en masse.
 
The third feature length film from director J.A. Bayona, A Monster Calls is an adaptation of a fantasy novel penned by Patrick Ness. Focused on the trials and tribulations of young Conor, our guy really gets trounced by the full complement of tough turns. His Mum—Felicity Jones, who is having a massive year—is gravely ill. His father lives across the globe. He’s relentlessly bullied at school. And he’s often left in the clutches of his stringent grandmother, Sigourney Weaver, trying to English accent her way out of this thing.
 
As pressure mounts and nightmares persist, Conor finally meets the Monster (Neesons!). The Monster’s aim is simple, to tell Conor three tales, and then Conor will tell the fourth tale, his truth. Where this may read like straightforward fare, A Monster Calls readily takes its place among the collection of melancholic, challenging “kids” movies. This film has an aching heart, and it guards it with suspicion and rage and confusion. It’s a kind of fairy tale, but only in the stock players. Conor has his otherworldly monster, and the monster tells stories to Conor about princes, witches, invisible men, apothecaries and so on.
 
Through this the film does its most thoughtful work. So many stories of this ilk are neatly portioned out into simple morality tales. The wronged prevail, the wicked are punished, and the good notch easy, indisputable victories. And as is the standard build, there is a beautiful gilt wall of “Happily Ever After” placed at the end, forever containing the purity of this narrative. But A Monster Calls understands that happily ever after is not punctuation, but a through point. As long as we draw breath, there is another chapter. Ill-intentioned good and well-intentioned bad swirl together in so many of the complications life sets in our path, no matter how much we crave a simple, tidy answer.

The Monster imbues Conor with these lessons, and Conor continues to arrive at junctures where these truths reverberate again and again. You can only take the jagged edges of the puzzle as they are and find the best way to piece them together, knowing they will always defy the well machined pieces of our ideal outcome. You’re left with something a bit rough and haggard, and therein lies not only the monster, but our monster. A friend, an antagonist, an ally, and a foil. It’s not an entity to be completely tamed, but one of many forces to fit into our lives.

​Because occasionally, when it’s as though your life has rejected you and the ground beneath you is rent asunder, your monster may be the only one who can save you.

​—Monte Monreal

While watching La La Land, the new musical from Damien Chazelle, I was consumed with thoughts of another film. Not one the technicolor musicals of Hollywood’s supposed golden age this film so desperately gropes for, but 2016’s own Hacksaw Ridge. How could a blood-soaked, Mel Gibson-directed WWII fantasy even tangentially connect with a feel-good studio musical throwback? Quite readily, as it’s the same product but for different audiences.
 
Hacksaw Ridge is a true story reimagined as a work of red state masturbatory fiction. La La Land is the urban archipelago’s fever dream of effortless multiculturalism and smarter-than-you nudge-wink references.  Hacksaw places a premium on values of righteousness and war. A demand for blind adherence to institutions like religion, family, and capital ‘A’ America. La La Land finds pleasure in its patchwork of empowered individuals, self-obsessed creative types, fame as a worthy aspiration, and Los Angeles as center of the universe. Both films are, to that end, rife with problems.
 
Hacksaw Ridge is set in some version of Lynchburg, Virginia, and the Pacific Theater conspicuously missing black Americans who—not only fought bravely in WWII—but comprised at least 11 percent of enlisted men. The only non-whites we meet are Japanese soldiers described as, “Satan himself,” who crave death and only own their modicum of honor in a perverse episode of ritual suicide. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting with a gory, morbid, cynical center meant to illustrate the true sacrifices of war, but I believe only further exacerbates the chicken hawk nation we’ve become. La La Land, well, more on this later but most pressing...what L.A. is this set in? Where are all of L.A.’s staunchly ethnic neighborhoods? Where are the freaks, weirdos, scum bags, and homeless seemingly disappeared from her mural lined streets?
 
This divergence in view is indicative of a larger problem we collectively, urgently have to pull apart. In my bubble, Hacksaw Ridge was a laughable piece of jingoistic non-art, but it did $75 million on no press after being dumped in the lull between summer and prestige season. In my bubble, La La Land is spoken of with breathless wonder. It will undoubtedly be a Best Picture nominee—if not winner—as Hollywood has gone a whole year without patting itself on the back over a movie about THE BIZ. It’s hard to know how La La Land will fare in the “real” world—the nationwide theater kid demographic can only push the needle so hard—but I’m eager to see the results.
 
It boils down to one product: the connective tissue between both films, nostalgia. Choose your delusion. Hold fast to the noxious idea of some remembered village, sanitized for your protection, a place you can never truly occupy. In a line you’ll likely see quoted in every La La Land review, Gosling’s character Sebastian comments that in L.A., “they worship everything and value nothing.” Whether the line is intended to be as thoroughly panoptic and revealing as it is, that’s the nut. Nostalgia is an illusory altar of half-truth and quarter truth and faulty embroidered memory, each recreation and reimagining a more grotesque lie. Yet, people throw themselves in front of it, prostrate, chanting like a holy invocation, “things used to be better, things used to be different.”  
 
To its credit, La La Land allows for something Hacksaw Ridge wouldn’t dare fold into the equation: moments of self-reflection. Yes, the picture is outfitted with weapons grade nostalgia—up to and including the fact that the movie was shot in CinemaScope (*intense eye roll*)—but the film at least challenges itself to play with and subvert the idea. Our leads, Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Baby Goose) recognize they’re throwbacks consumed by their kitsch. Sebastian is a beleaguered musician and a staunch enemy of jazz aka a dude who really loves jazz. Mia is a plucky wannabe actress who has a wall sized Ingrid Bergman poster looming over her. And it’s as though their fantasy of a bygone, velvet upholstered, glamorously lit Hollywood is so consuming, that when they’re together they block out any semblance of the real world/industry/Los Angeles around them.
 
"Wow, Monte, bruh, so you hated this movie, huh?" Nope. Not at all. It’s perfectly fine. Heck, it’s briefly pretty damn good, but young homie isn’t gonna lie to you neither. What Chazelle has achieved is genuinely mind boggling. For a movie of its scope and caliber, he made it for next to nothing, and it is visually sumptuous. I mean, taking your eyes to a buffet of sound and color. Stone and Gosling are wonderful together. The music, where I don’t think it’s something I’d enjoy independent of the production, is incredibly thoughtful. There are hooks, themes, shapes, and reprises. There are massive numbers at the outset and tiny, quiet, sweet duets. There are moments of pure, unmitigated magic. Yes, even this coal-furnace-grown-cold heart of mine had embers left enough that I was whisked away by the glorious sequence set at Griffith Observatory. The courtship number with an L.A. sunset in the background? Knock me over with your Criterion copy of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
 
Ultimately, the tale of the tape is that La La Land is obsessed with what it perceives itself to be. Like some quixotic Ouroboros, the film is about two people locked in a self-imposed identity, who long for and linger in a world of which they were never a part. Yet they manage to forge the life they want wrapped around these tenets. Through this sentimentality woven wormhole—strictly reserved for the fools who dare to dream—we arrive at a climactic sequence of things remembered and approximated futures, a replication engine of personal nostalgia inside a glittering edifice of ‘remember when.’
 
Where this seems exhausting, I found sincere truth in the final sequence. La La Land elevated itself beyond precious musical to something unexpected and emotionally profound. Because when you see them years from now, after they’ve slipped through your fingers like strands of their silken hair, you’ll realize the memories and imagined outcomes are little more than moveable painted sets and scratched eight millimeter film of the imagination. The agonizing bliss of memory, the cruel necessity of nostalgia. A component of our mind so powerful, that these sequences can devour us. But it’s the rebellion of the now, the strength to puncture this unreality that creates some semblance of the present. And then you can dare to carry on in the messy, uncomfortable world we all have to occupy together. 

—Monte Monreal