La La Land (Damian Chazelle)

[Henry Gale]

The only thing about it that doesn't hold up as well to me is its portrayal of Hollywood. . .a lot of times, it's beautiful, especially with its art direction and locations. But from other perspectives, it comes off as cartoonish, such as when Mia is listening to a writer talk about a script he wrote that was Goldilocks and the Three Bears from the perspective of the bears. It just sounds too cheap for me to believe those are the ideas that wannabe writers in LA come up with. . .unless there are others that can vouch for experiences like this?

Oh wow, see at first I thought you were going to say the studio lot stuff (like the bickering actors or the girl asking for a refund on her glutenous bagel) or the audition personnel, which I think is purposely heightened (even when negative in tone) to add to the sort of whimsy of any elements relating to showbiz life through Mia's eyes, as if it is fairy tale in nature -- all of which I realize is executed much more clearly with the musical elements of the movie, and when it decides to trickle into the narrative, as well as leave it.

But the writer going on a self-congratulatory tangent about how "people tell him" things like he has a "knack for world-building" and other unprompted ideas he clearly just wants to plant in people's heads about him, saying he has a lot of buzz around him at the moment, throwing out a dead-end pitch that sounds artificially subversive like the Goldilocks one that no one asked him to give, etc.; That's oddly the stuff I found cringingly accurate to a certain type of young, self-perceptually twisted hotshot that I've only thankfully only experienced from a distance, to not have to engage with directly, but still made me laugh through slight shutters when seeing portrayed here.