The Movie Press
  • Movie Reviews
  • Twitter News/Updates
  • News & Notes
  • DVD
  • Box Office Results
  • Contact
  • About Us

Worship Everything, Value Nothing

12/9/2016

2 Comments

 
Picture
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

2 Comments
Damilola
2/10/2017 04:52:16 am

This is so well-written.

Reply
Marty Smith
8/7/2017 07:15:32 am

I recently watched this film for a third time (with my two older daughters who LOVE it), and I was struck this time by Gosling's line quoted above. I googled the line, and stumbled across this review.

There was something about this film that stuck in my craw, though I have grown to love the movie more each time I watch it. Mr. Monreal... you nailed it! I will be looking for more of your reviews.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    October 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    July 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    March 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    October 2009
    September 2009
    August 2009
    July 2009
    June 2009
    May 2009
    April 2009
    March 2009
    February 2009
    January 2009
    December 2008
    November 2008
    October 2008
    September 2008
    August 2008

    Categories

    All
    Austin Film Festival
    Darcie Duttweiler Reviews
    Derrick Mitcham Reviews
    Eric Harrelson Reviews
    Eric Pulsifer Reviews
    Eric Pulsifer Reviews
    Fantastic Fest
    Greg Maclennan Reviews
    Greg Wilson Reviews
    Jessica Hixson Reviews
    Mark Collins Reviews
    Monte Monreal Reviews
    Reviews
    Rob Heidrick Reviews
    Rob Heidrick Reviews
    Sxsw

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.