Here's To The Fools Who Dream

Year: 2016

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Rosemarie DeWitt 

Run Time: 2 hours 8 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG- 13

I liked Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash. It was a little dour for my tastes, but it had an excellent sense of rhythm in both the editing and the music itself, and it had probably the most gonzo, purely experiential ending of the whole year. So while I wasn’t in love with it, I had a good time. When I found out that his follow-up feature La La Land would go full-blown musical, paying homage to classic Hollywood and reuniting Emma Stone with Ryan Gosling, I was excited. If you’re a director I’m still iffy on, there’s hardly a better genre to choose to get me on your side.

All I can say is, it worked.

In La La Land, down-on-her-luck actress Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist who wants to prevent the style from becoming a lost art, keep crossing paths in the streets of Los Angeles. Although they don’t get along at first, their interactions blossom into a romance for the ages as they both set out to follow their dreams over the course of a hurdle-filled year.

Basically, the life story of any decent human being in 2016.

If you’re busy and don’t have time to sit through an entire review, just let me say this: La La Land is magical. It doesn’t take a genius to glance at Chazelle’s filmography and intuit that he loves jazz, but when you’re sitting in front of La La Land, there’s no question about it at all. His love for music leaps from every frame in a rhythm you feel, deep inside, your own heartbeat acting as a metronome.

Everything he learned from Whiplash he buffs to shining, shimmering perfection here. La La Land is an emotional, experiential film that grabs your hand and sweeps you up with it, depositing you back in your seat with yet another ending that slams you back against your cushion, barely able to manage a squeak of “oh, f**k.” Only this time it comes at the tail end of a movie that unequivocally earns that pure energy every step of the way. I find it embarrassing when people clap for movies in the theater as the credits roll, but I spontaneously burst into applause this time, not even realizing where I was. La La Land is less like a film and more like a human being performing directly to you, spilling its heart and soul all over the screen.

I don’t want to get hyperbolic, because overhype might shatter this delicate, tender film, but I’m working hard to convey the feeling of ineffable pure emotion that it creates. It’s not a perfect film. Some of the Hollywood satire is a little obvious. Some of the close-up shots looked weirdly flat. But it’s one of the best times I’ve had in a theater all year, and that’s even more important than being flawless.

Someone should have let Stanley Kubrick know about that.

La La Land is a musical the likes of which hasn’t graced American screens in, oh, a millennium or two. A throwback to classic movie musicals in its blend of smoky jazz and dizzy production numbers, it combines Old Hollywood glamour and glitz with a more modern realism in its approach to character and plot. Although the grand, choreographed numbers that open the film are fizzy delights, there’s a certain solemnity buried deep within them, about how those with unrecognized talent feel alienated by the peppy-happy gloss of it all. Honestly, it’s the best of both worlds. It handles the same themes of art vs. humanity that Whiplash tackled, but with less aggressive grimness.

Bringing reality into this musical is honestly the best thing for it, because it avoids being an empty, whimsical artifice while at the same time lending a degree of sparkle to the bitter streets of Los Angeles. In the film’s best number “A Lovely Night,” Stone and Gosling slip and slide on the gravel of a hilly road overlooking a vast purple sky, sneaking a bit of grandeur into a mundane urban setting. This is the level La La Land pretty much always operates on, converting real life locations into a  fairy tale of asphalt and concrete.

Chazelle pulls out all the stops here, draping his frame in bright primary colors both in the lighting and the fabulous costuming. Every frame bursts with life, so when the more dreamlike sequences arrive, they don’t jar with the augmented reality they emerged from.

This is what the world would look like if I was in charge.

It’s a relentlessly beautiful film and I could talk about that all night, but I regretfully must move on because we need to talk about the actual music. This is a musical, after all, and how often do we get a chance to talk about those anymore? I’m a huge fan of big production numbers, and even though La La Land quickly settles into a  more subtle register, it kicks off with two incredibly impressive setpieces, using swooping camera moves and infrequent cutting to let the dancers really inhabit the space.

Then, when the film reduces itself to just Gosling and Stone, they shine in their own way. Although neither of them ahs the best voice (Gosling has a “playing guitar at a bonfire” roughness and Stone’s smoky voice translates well enough to song, although she tentatively avoids leaving a very narrow range), they have charisma in spades, and they can dance much better than I ever thought could be possible. They nail a beautifully clever tap number and recognize that in musical theater, personality is what’s most important. 

They shine onscreen and then are generous enough to allow themselves to be swallowed up by bombastic design sequences with the stagebound, overflowing aesthetic of the fantasy sequence in Singin’ in the Rain. And although I’m not a huge fan of the repeated, droning motif of the song “City of Stars,” every other track is a perfect match for the film, even the instrumentals, which I normally don’t care for in a musical.

Their chemistry outside of the music is likewise unassailable. For the second time this year, Gosling brings humor in surprising and endearing little ways, and Stone is the perfect sharp but vulnerable foil for his brassy faux confidence. They push and pull one another in a timeless, frequently hilarious romance full of color, life, and light. Literally. Every chance he gets, Chazelle launches Stone and Gosling into literal spotlights, singling them out from the crowd in the most shamelessly cinematic way possible.

God, this was a pretty movie.

At one point, Sebastian is asked how it’s possible for a traditionalist to be revolutionary. Well, La La Land answers that question. It’s both a dazzling nostalgia trip and an exciting, electric update of a classic story that combines both old and new into a dazzling, truthful, utterly pure cinema experience, capturing the glories of life with buoyant energy, whether they be as grand as a dream coming true or as intimate as holding hands for the first time in the movie theater.

TL;DR: La La Land is a gorgeous exercise in Old Hollywood nostalgia.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1216

They're Not Going Away

Year: 2015

Director: Gil Kenan

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Kennedi Clements

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

It's a bad sign when a movie betrays its inferiority by the time the opening logos finish. The MGM lion begins his signature roar, but before it finishes the screen flickers and glitches. Just like, oh, every single haunting movie from the years following Paranormal Activity. We're off to a good start.

Could Poltergeist, the remake of the classic 1982 film of the same name, have ever captured the iconic, haphazard looniness of its predecessor? Well, no. That was never gonna happen. But I have my doubts as to whether it had to be laboriously generic, disastrously unfrightening piffle that clings to the original film's every beat while simultaneously using it as a crutch to smooth out its inexplicable profusion of bald patches and limp its way to 90 minutes.

"The original movie just had one hand? Pssh, we can do better than that!" - Some (Probably Drunk) Executive

This Poltergeist revolves around the Bowens, our copy-and-paste-without-attributes middle class family: dad Eric (Sam Rockwell), mom Amy (Rosemarie DeWitt of United States of Tara), teen daughter Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), son Griffin (Kyle Catlett), and youngest daughter Maddy (Kennedi Clements), who isn't blonde so it's totally different and new, I promise. The HD TV inexplicably erupts into static, their complex was built on a cemetery, Maddy is whisked away into the Other Side, madcap paranormal hijinks ensue. Game, set, match.

In the film's most transgressive break from the Reagan-era plotting of the original film, the family is no longer a successful suburban paradigm, rather a victim of the economic turmoil plaguing the new millennium. When Eric is laid off from his successful job at John Deere, the family is forced to move to a new house in a lower income suburban complex, and the bulk of the family's thematic struggles revolve around their efforts to maintain their prior lifestyle and status.

The opening act is all "let's just try to make this work" and "it's not much, but it'll do," as they attempt to still mingle with their bourgeois friends who titter about their bad neighborhood over wine and canapés. This creates an atmosphere which is industriously undermined by the fact that their new house is still basically a palace.

What a hovel. Let's cross the street so we don't have to walk in front of it.

This flippant disregard for the actual realities of the economy is matched only by the film's ignorance of what made the original Poltergeist work: namely, state-of-the-art effects anchored by skilled performances and a sneaking allegory about the dark side of the American dream. The absence of these elements leaves a huge sucking void in the center of the film, especially when the effects sequences come into play.

To be fair, the visuals would have been state-of-the-art had they come out the same weekend as Shrek.  Unfortunately for everyone, the CGI (on the corpses especially) would be embarrassing in a Once Upon a Time episode, let alone a feature film that producers had the audacity to charge money for. It's not like it's not still cheaper to buy real corpses. Just chuck some in there and call it a day, curse be damned. 

I couldn't find a picture of the CGI, so here's a picture of something equally uninteresting.

But moan all I might about some of the more egregious computer-generated insults to the collective intelligence of the human race, there is one central thing Poltergeist 2015 gets wrong above all else: it's not even bad enough to reasonably hate. 

It is only ever a pale scene-by-scene imitation of the original plot slathered liberally with the ripest clichés the modern paranormal genre has to offer: flickering iPhones, inexplicable rabid animals, creepy dolls, and the like, imbued with flop sweat by the most achingly unoriginal score ever committed by a studio orchestra. It is not scary. It is not appealing. But it's blandly competent in the worst kind of way.

For their part, Rosemarie DeWitt and Sam Elliot do considerably well endowing their nothing roles with warmth and chemistry, even managing to elevate the unquestionably anemic child actors to something halfway decent to watch. And there are exactly two sequences that approach a feeling similar to horror, like the anticipatory tingle you get in your gut when somebody is reaching out to tickle you.

Why does the doll market continue to thrive? Haven't we learned by now?

There are exactly two modes under which Poltergeist operates at all times, both of which have a trickily incestuous Buster-and-Lucille relationship with the 1982 original.

Mode #1: Do the Same Thing (Only Worse)

Poltergeist is as devoted to Spielberg's script as Madonna is to making sure nobody forgets who Madonna is. Scene after scene drifts by with arbitrary sameness and in those moments where it breaks from the road more traveled, without fail it lurches sickeningly back into place with an overfamiliar monologue or bastardized visual quotation.

Unfortunately, the adaptation is only skin deep, lacking even a scrap of meaning. The film rushes through its key points, blowing its wad way too soon with overexplained metaphysics and overly severe first act disturbances that change the family from curious onlookers to dumbass horror movie fodder. Oh, and the key "they moved the bodies but not the headstones" scene? It's not even discovered, it's just a tossed-off line that we're supposed to take for granted.

It's too fast, too furious, and the dialogue is skin-crawlingly inane. If you ever hear me say "I'm not less scared. But I feel a little braver." in real life, please feel free to spray me with a fire hose.

Mode #2: Change Things (For the Worse)

Obviously nobody can replace the late, great Zelda Rubinstein. But a reality TV huckster in a porkpie hat doesn't capture the appropriate tone whatsoever. It's hard to care about his paranormal antics when you're actively, devoutly wishing that he'll perish. Jared Harris does what he can with the role, but the character devours him with smarmy deficiency.

The other additions are equally inane and fruitlessly "modern." Camera drones! GPS beacons! Words With Friends (an already outdated reference that belies the film's tortured production history)! Poltergeist desperately strains to connect to the modern suburban experience, but the end product is something like this film's depiction of the Other Side (which we've learned from experience is best kept offscreen): a whirling tube of shrill nonentities, howling and reaching for something impenetrably far from their grasp.

It's saying something when we care more about Maddy's stuffed unicorn/pig doll than we actually do about her.

To sum it all up, Poltergeist is a waste of time. It attempts to recapture the burning brilliance of the original film but flies too close to the sun with uninspired contributions from cast and crew alike. It is too similar to the original Poltergeist to be interesting, yet too far from its vastly superior quality to be fun in any way.

And so another remake struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

TL;DR: Poltergeist is blandly generic piffle, bad enough to be annoying but no so much that it's enjoyably atrocious.
Rating: 4/10
Should I Spend Money On This? No. And if the box office pull is anything to go by, you haven't. Good job.
Word Count: 1252
Reviews In This Series
Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982)
Poltergeist II: The Other Side (Gibson, 1986)
Poltergeist III (Sherman, 1988)
Poltergeist (Kenan, 2015)