#every relationship has been so painfully awkward and empty before now and now im just like oh. this is how it's supposed to feel

[guinevereslancelot]

just got kissed for the first time in over a decade 😵‍💫

[astralaces]

im bitter so here is a hateful review of la la land

okay, so before i went into this movie i had read nothing but good things about it. i’ll admit i was a bit skeptical, but i sat my butt in that theater hoping that the reviews had been right.

boy, were they wrong.

alright so my biggest complaint overall is that i was told that this was a musical but i swear no one in this can sing to save their life. now im no vocal expert, but the leads voices seemed far too weak and breathy. they get a a tiny bit better towards the end, but even then the performance is lackluster. 

my next problem with this is that even though this is supposed to be a musical, none of the numbers sang by the cast do much to progress the story. the beginning of the movie literally wastes your time with a number that does nothing but remind you that this movie will, in fact, have singing and dancing. this wouldn’t have ticked me off as much if the number was actually good.

anyways, after that pointless number mia and seb (the two leads) see each other for the first time when seb angrily speeds past mia who was holding up traffic.

after that happens, we find out that mia is an aspiring actress who works as a barista. we see her go through several failed auditions and after she goes home we are introduced to her friends/roommates (who turn out to be irrelevant for the rest of the film) and then get forced to sit through another crappy number. again, the number serves no purpose other than to show us that mia apparently doesn’t get out much. anyways, at the end of the number mia gets all dressed up to go to a party with her friends.

so at this point i just want the movie to get on with it, BUT WAIT! now we get a full rewind and get to see the beginning of the day through seb’s point of view! honestly the pacing of this movie was shit the whole way through.

okay, so we go back to seb beeping at mia to get her ass moving along the freeway and then we see him go to his empty apartment filled with unpacked boxes. his sister is there and basically tells him to get his shit together and this is how we find out that he wants to open a jazz club. 

so some more irrelevant shit happens and we shift back to mia who has ditched the party and stumbles upon some kind of dinner club place. and oh, what do you know, seb is there playing piano (his ass is then promptly fired for being unable to stick to the music he was given). 

as seb walks out, mia tries to tell him that his playing was great, but he shoves her out of the way and leaves. great job of making him seem likable movie.

so then the movie shifts to the springtime (everything before this was in winter) and mia is at another party where seb also happens to be. the movie pulls another bullshit card by having the two of them recognize each other even though the last time they ever “interacted” (if you can call it that) was months ago.

mia is still bitter about seb being a douche that one night so she starts trying to give him a hard time. again, nice way to give us some likable characters movie! i swear almost every action taken by these characters just reinforces the fact that they are both assholes.

more shit ensues and for no reason at all seb and mia decide to take a walk together. in case you were wondering, the chemistry between them is horribly written. i was sitting there wondering why in god’s name the movie was trying to push it. it’s obvious that these two have absolutely no reason to like each other at all.

anyways, they spout some bullshit about how the fact that they keep running into each other must be fate (even though this is barely the third time they’ve seen each other and the first time they interacted for more than a split second). honestly, these forced romances make me shudder.

honestly this whole movie is a train wreak so i might get some of the rest of this shit out of order and i might miss some stuff, but bare with me.

so later on seb shows up to mia’s workplace and they hang out (it’s worth noting that since mia works on movie sets seb had to run past the guards to get in. i don’t know about you guys, but i’d find that kind of behavior really freaky from someone i just met.). seb ends up telling mia all about jazz (a painfully boring scene to sit through. i understand that the movie wanted to educate it’s audience but as someone who was taught this shit in school it made me roll my eyes) and mia begins to like the genre as well. so seb invites her out and she agrees.

the problem with this is she already has a boyfriend (or something to that effect. i don’t think it’s ever explicitly said what her relationship with him is, but from what my friends and i could tell they were in a relationship). he takes her out to dinner on the same night she planned her date with seb and she just. up and fucking leaves the dinner table. no explanation, no curtesy for anyone else. she just gives a pathetic “im sorry” and races over to seb. 

so mia and seb watch a movie and are about to kiss when the movie’s film burns up, interrupting them. gotta keep that crappily written romantic tension going kids!

eventually mia and seb get together and we get a dull montage of them going out. at one point they’re in a museum and they fucking start floating through the room out of no where?? i get that these types of films always have that element of disbelief to them but this was so fucking jarring?? the movie had been taking itself so seriously up until this point that all i could do was sit there and mouth are you serious?

so la la la they start living together and shit. eventually they come across an old “friend” of seb’s who im pretty sure was named keith (i might be wrong but im just going to refer to him as this). so the scene with them is really awkward and seb looks uncomfortable. he tells mia that things are always awkward with keith, but we are never told why. it’s obvious that these two characters have some kind of history but it is literally never addressed. 

so the reason keith was there was to offer seb a job with his new group. mia convinces seb to go for it and in return seb convinces mia, who is still struggling as an actress, to write her own show. 

keith’s group turns out to play their version on a modern take on jazz and seb (who wants to save the genre) is turned off at first but hey, the guy needs some money so he joins.

eventually the group becomes a huge success (they put on a show and everyone except mia likes their music) and seb is always away from home performing.

because of this, we get the only entertaining thing in this entire film. the sad thing is the scene as a whole is bland, but one of seb’s lines brought me back from the brink of death after sitting through everything that had happened beforehand.

alright, so mia basically asks seb when he’s going to get out of the group and start his jazz club/restaurant since that was his dream and he had already gained enough funds to do it. seb tells her that he’s going to continue with the group because he’s finally making some money.

the couple continues arguing and that’s when it happened. seb added three years onto my life when he essentially tells mia that she only liked him when he was poor off his ass cuz it made her feel better about herself.

now, just because that was the only entertaining this in this whole movie, that does not mean i’m not going to add asshole points onto seb’s character. 

so mia storms out of the apartment and seb stays behind. so any normal viewer would assume this is a breakup for them, but apparently it’s not? because seb still tries to make it to mia’s one woman show.

needless to say seb ends up getting there too late and mia is pretty much destroyed over the fact that no one expect her friends and a few other people decided to show up. now this is where we get our big break. seb tries to apologize but mia drives off because of how hurt she is. she ends up going back to her parents’ house.

a while later a woman calls seb. she’s some kind of casting director or something and she says she was at mia’s one woman show and she loved it (can anyone say plot convenience?). so seb drives off to get mia.

he gets there and the two of them begin to argue. seb wants her to meet with the lady who called him because it was a chance to make her dreams come true. mia doesn’t want to go because she’s tired of failing and being disappointed. 

seb then goes on to be a hypocritical ass about the whole situation. he essentially gave up his dreams to play in keith’s group and had the audacity to get mad at mia for giving up on her’s. eventually mia comes around and meets with the woman.

surprise surprise, she gets the part. she leaves to paris for five years after she and seb proclaim that they love each other. in the end, she comes back, but she had married another man and has a daughter.

she goes for a night out with her husband and they walk into a jazz club. SURPRISE! it’s seb’s club. once they see each other we get a shitty “what could have been” ending where it shows what their lives could have been like if they ended up together.

needless to say it’s another waste of time. as i’ve already said their romance was dug out of a garbage can, but even if it had been written well, mia and seb are just plain unlikable.

when you’re telling a story your characters have to be likable. i’m not saying that they have to be perfect and flawless, but they have to have at least a few redeeming qualities for your audience to want them to succeed.

as far as mia and seb go they were such assholes that i didn’t really give a shit if they’d succeed in making their dreams come true. i wasn’t rooting for them to end up together. all i wanted was for the shit fest that is la la land to end.

thankfully, once mia and her husband leave the club the film actually DOES end (i swear there were like three fake out endings in this. it’d make you think your suffering had ended but NOPE. there’s more!). 

the thing that really gets me about this crap movie is the fact that it gets so much praise. hell, even the camera work was shit in some parts. they’d pan over a large group of people, but keep everything blurred. after a while that shit really starts to hurt your eyes.

the setting was jarring (it takes place in modern day, but tries to go for a 20′s/50′s aesthetic. it just doesn’t work) and the overall performance was underwhelming. 

the writing was horrible and the musical talent was nonexistent. all in all this is one of the worst movies i’ve seen.