Chris At The Pictures

Like many others, I’m sure; this review begins with a clarification. No, more a resigned confession: I’ve never been one for musicals. While everyone else of my generation grew up with the animated song-and-dance phenomenon of the Disney renaissance, the closest I got were cartoons with a few songs in them (predominantly Toy Story, the Phil Collins-heavy Tarzan and a crummy VHS copy of The Transformers: The Movie). There’ve been some exceptions every now and then, including but not limited to Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds, parts of Les Miserables, and the time my housemate practically forced me to watch Chicago. Despite the varying quality of those examples, nothing has ever been able to shake my innate prejudice. I spent the opening logos of La La Land braced to cringe, waiting for the spasm in my gut and the embarrassed shiver to cross my cheeks…but neither came.

Instead, I spent two hours jigging my knee up and down in glee, weeping in wonder and beaming in total surrender, side-by-side with my mum (who, fittingly, took me to see Tarzan all those years ago). For those of you who’ve been living under a rock since the film’s dazzling first appearance at the Venice film festival, Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) directs Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as Sebastian and Mia, two California dreamers who begin to fall in love after a chance encounter on a busy highway. Seb aspires to open his own Jazz club (in order to save what he sees as a dying genre), and Mia, a wannabe actor, is desperate to escape her life of serving coffee to the inhabitants of the Warner Bros. backlot (“That’s the street from Blade Runner!” – I whispered excitedly as the pair wandered among the vintage façades).

Yeah, I’ve never found myself attached to the grand heritage La La Land is so clearly besotted with, but throw in a location from one of my favourite movies, an original John Legend song and not one, but two sequences paying homage to Rebel Without a Cause, and you’ve got every inch of my being in an unrelenting embrace. Plus, giving Stone a lead role helps. Honestly, I could gush for hours about how her every eye roll, head spin and half-smile in this has extended my life expectancy by several decades, but we’d be here for twice that length.

Where Gosling is concerned, another of my long-held prejudices has been put to rest. While his woozy eyes have understandably wowed many, to me his expression has always appeared vacant, almost detached. In Shane Black’s The Nice Guys, this worked wonders (his character was a complete klutz), and here, too, his hazy gaze speaks to something authentic: the far-reaching mind of a dreamer. I finally get it, you guys.

Okay, now I’ve confessed and repented for my sins, can I gush about the routines, please? Cool, thanks: Justin Hurwitz’ songs are perfect, the dances move with the sweep and grace of sublime animation, and all are presented in a rainbow-soaked palette as flavoursome and primary as a packet of fruit pastilles. Standouts include a hilltop toe-tap (that moonlit beauty from the poster), a one-shot parkour through heavy traffic and a soaring waltz among the stars. Despite wanting to, I hesitate to blabber further: I’d hate to ruin any of what this film has in store.

In contrast to the stark colours, the morality of the story - of Seb and Mia’s victories and sacrifices - is far from black and white. I’m pressed to label it ‘earnest to a fault’…but, well; it hasn't got one! Chazelle knows we’re too cynical to buy a total lovesick ode to Tinseltown right now, so peppers the sweet with spice. Even I (a sometimes fantastically over-sentimental soul) could understand why the film makes certain moves towards the flip-side of fairy tales, undertaking manoeuvres I can’t illustrate any clearer for, again, fear of spoiling the surprise.

So: a glorious ear-worm of a soundtrack, astounding visuals, unfairly loveable stars and a surprisingly textured narrative…I think that just about covers it! Wait, there’s a ‘Take on Me’ cover, too? Complete with Gosling passive-aggressively plinking a keytar? Sod it, take your five stars and get out of here; you’re already too good for 2017 as it is.

P.S. Please don’t actually go, we need you. Badly.

It’s all surface and no substance in this high-flying but heavy-handed prequel to the Peter Pan story, featuring characters ‘introduced by’ J.M. Barrie…no, really, that’s how the original author who created these marvellous stories is referred to in a two second snippet of the closing credits.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a young boy – subject of an ancient prophecy – is whisked away to a new world in order to defeat great evil while making his mother Mary (subtle, I know) proud. Peter (newcomer Levi Miller) is snatched from a dingy workhouse (itself snatched from Oliver Twist) by a band of pirates led by the dreaded Blackbeard (a hammy Hugh Jackman) and taken to Neverland. In the depths of Blackbeard’s fairy dust mines, Peter crosses paths with a young James Hook (Garett Hedlund), and the stage is set for all our characters to tread their first steps towards the story we all know and love.