'La La Land' is a Fleetingly Charming But Painfully Dull Ode to Old Hollywood

From the incredibly showy opener and opening titles that boldly declare "SHOT IN CINEMASCOPE," it’s almost immediately clear that something feels just slightly off in Damian Chazelle’s sophomore follow-up to the angst-ridden Whiplash. These commuters in downtown L.A. jumping on their parked cars certainly act like they’re in a classic Hollywood musical and the camera certainly follow them as if they’re in one, and yet this number does nothing to charm or entice you into feeling the waves of nostalgia it’s meant to evoke.

This forgettable tune is followed by another, this time sung by star Emma Stone and her girlish cohorts all bathed in technicolor light and garbed in flashy colors meant to evoke memories of superior films such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or An American in Paris but again failing to spark any sort of charm or delight those films are renowned for. Chazelle keeps the camera rolling and spinning to wow the film geeks, but it ultimately feels so performative in a way that’s aping classics rather than evoking them.

And yet by some small miracle, the film begins to click when jazz pianist Sebastian (played by ultra-charmer Ryan Gosling) begins his half of the tale. A scene where Gosliing’s free-jazz roots and sensibilities clash with his employer’s (played by Whiplash villain J.K. Simmons) desire to keep it simple, stupid is one of the movie’s rare moments of real charm and musical fun.

Subsequently when Gosling and Stone meet at an '80s themed party a few scenes later, it feels as if the two stars’ potent chemistry and charm is going to be enough to carry La La Land through the bland songwriting and uninvolving story. Their tap-dance routine against a scenic Hollywood skyline is probably the closest the film can get to actually nearing the grace of a Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire film’s essence.

But this grace quickly becomes short-lived as it becomes imminently clear that the stars’ chemistry simply can’t prop up this two hour-plus exercise in nostalgia-baiting. The romance blossoms pretty quickly, so instead of a familiar boy meets girl tale, the story starts to revolve around two people so hopelessly annoying in their desire to perform their art like in the “good ol' days” that you begin to beg for these characters to break up simply so the film might actually become about something interesting again.

Sebastian’s desire to build a jazz club with real integrity, which initially felt like an innocent jab at how self-serious jazz purists can be, is actually in fact treated as the ultimate stake for this character’s arc. When Sebastian decides to get an actual steady-paying job any musician would kill for, the film treats this as a tacky betrayal of his “pure” art form and inexplicably wants to punish Gosling’s character for daring to step outside his freeform-jazz sensibilities. (And on that note, are we seriously supposed to hate John Legend’s music in this film? He’s meant to be the tacky antithesis to pure jazz but they actually give his band some of the more enjoyable music here.)

Ultimately every bit of aesthetic La La Land appropriates from infinitely superior and more sincere films simply serves as glorified window-dressing to a boring, cold and ultimately joyless reworking of Hollywood tropes without any kind of story to hang them upon. It practically begs the viewer to take it so seriously that it becomes near laughable “Look at these posters from old movies! The long takes! Hey remember CINEMASCOPE?! They shot Rebel Without a Cause in CinemaScope and we even have that in our movie! *wink wink* Are you not entertained??” the movie practically screams at you. The musical setpieces are neither frequent enough nor impressive enough to justify such a bloated runtime and despite its glorious ending and one (count it: ONE) impressive song, this facade is ultimately about as sturdy as a Hollywood backlot: push on it a bit and it topples spectacularly.

I won’t be surprised at all to see La La Land taking its victory lap around awards shows this season, because there’s nothing Hollywood loves more in an awards darling than a bout of self-congratulatory backpatting about its own legacy (see: The Artist), but you can certainly expect it to be forgotten about this time next year.

Ron Howard's 'Eight Days a Week' Is a Sweet, Slightly Empty Treat for Beatles Fans

How do you even begin to break down the immense mythology of a group widely considered to be the greatest of all time into something digestible and accessible but also still reverent? The eight years of musical, visual, historical, economical, political and social impact The Beatles left behind looms like a giant block of marble that should only intimidate any author or documentarian foolish enough to try and mold it into a singular experience that does the group justice.

And yet in truth, it’s insanely difficult to craft a bad movie around the story of the Fab Four. For all of the pomp and circumstance surrounding the band’s legacy, any filmmaker who deigns to cover the band’s story essentially has the perfect subjects: four of the most affable, down-to-earth, creative and interesting people who ever walked the Earth. The filmmakers have a smorgasbord of every kind of song imaginable at their disposal to set a mood or tone, a majority of which are already in pop music’s pantheon of greatest ever. So really you’ve only got yourself to blame if you can make a bad film with all of that at your disposal.

With that said, at this point in history it is much easier to make a boring film about The Beatles. After so many books and documentaries covering every inch and aspect of The Beatles’ career, at some point a hardcore fan can only get so much out of a “new” interpretation a storyteller tries to craft out of that eight year marble block without some hint of what’s already come before.

And Ron Howard’s latest documentary begins dangerously on that cusp of blandness, threatening to turn into just a shiny new coat of paint on the same storyline even the most casual of Beatles fan is conscious of. The montage of those rough n’ tumble nights in Hamburg coupled with their subsequent haircuts/suits that led to Please Please Me’s chart-topping overnight success... it threatens on yada-yada-yada territory before the real fun actually begins.

Where Eight Days a Week begins to differentiate itself is in making you feel the absolute and all-consuming chaos of an event that was The Beatles’ touring years. A treasure trove of great concert material has been carefully remastered and restored for this documentary (a perfect justification for the film’s existence if you really needed one) and the footage of swaths of young people screaming their heads off, rushing stages, and evading police makes you feel just how singular an experience the Beatles were in history. Nothing had ever happened like this before and nothing would ever again.

The baby boomer generation was desperate for a way to express themselves, and these unassuming, charming lads with similar haircuts and incredible songwriting and vocal abilities came along and changed everything,These four young men were at the center of the world’s biggest cultural maelstrom and somehow trying to maintain their own sanity. The film runs you through the elation of Ed Sullivan and Shea Stadium all the way through to the bitter end at the KKK rallies in Memphis and the miserable Candlestick park final gig.

Their cheery and cheeky demeanor on that electric first tour of America heartbreakingly contrasted with the weariness of the magnifying glass is the film’s biggest success. It makes the mere existence of any Beatles music that followed the madness of their touring years seem like a God-given miracle.

The film wisely chooses to focus on the band’s overwhelming unity during these progressively trying times and puts a sunny disposition on the group’s overall dynamic. It’s nice to have a Beatles documentary that pits The Beatles against the world when so many others like to focus on their internal battles that came later. Those touring years, as Ringo mentions in the film, were when The Beatles had to look out for each other first and foremost. So while it may feel dishonest to exclude the turmoil of their later studio work, it’s impossible to deny the bond the Fab Four shared with one another.

There’s a few glaring omissions in terms of Beatles lore, in particular manager Brian Epstein is paid an abysmal amount of lip service considering how especially important he was to the success of this period of the Beatles career and in terms of interviewees, there’s hardly much on offer that hasn’t been stated better elsewhere (for instance the only real archival interview footage with George comes from the superior if exhaustive Beatles Anthology), and a few subjects may leave you scratching your head about their inclusion but overall it’s good fun and good-natured even if it doesn’t forge a brand new vision of history.

While hardcore fans familiar with most of these intimate details may not find anything revelatory here, it’s worth the price of admission for the glut of restored and remastered footage of some classic Beatles concerts and if you’re able to see it in theaters, the entire Shea Stadium concert plays following the movie, fully restored in 4K with remastered sound. It goes down like a smooth, soothing ale for those of us already under the Fab Four’s spell, while still providing those looking for an accessible entry point to the Beatles’ early career with a satisfying result.

Only in cinemas September 15th. With world premiere broadcast live & specially remastered concert footage. Book your tickets now: http://scnl.co/BeatlesTix The Beatles played Shea Stadium on August 15th 1965 in what was to be the first rock concert ever staged in a stadium in front of more than 55,000 people.

'Steve Jobs' Is Dynamic Fire-Cracker of a Biopic

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of reading Walter Isaacson's incredible portrait of the tech icon Steve Jobs in preparation for this very movie and I found myself simply unable to put it down. I had always been fascinated by Jobs as a CEO unlike any other, a man I saw as responsible for products that completely revolutionized how I viewed computers, telephones and music.

But Isaacson's book also helped me grasp Jobs' incredibly difficult nature. He was one of the most stubborn and irritable people to work with and often had fractured relationships with many people due to his arrogant and driven nature. But as insufferable as he was, Jobs was wholly dedicated to creating some of the world's greatest ever products. Jobs didn't believe that art and products has to be independent of each other and in fact considered himself an artist above all, just as his idol Bob Dylan whose music is accurately prominent in this latest attempt to capture Jobs onscreen.

Isaacson's biography is an intricate and intimate examination of a very complex individual and probably comes as close as we'll ever get to knowing everything there was to know about the complicated visionary and the demons that drove him.

So of course something is immediately lost in the translation to the screen as the level of detail that is compiled in such a comprehensive overview of Jobs' life would be impossible. And instead of even attempting to cover such an eventful life in just two hours, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin chooses to focus on three of the most important product launches in Jobs' life: the unveiling of the Macintosh, his NeXT cube after he left Apple, and culminating with the launch of the iMac.

This is certainly a clever idea because if there was anything Steve Jobs’ life revolved around it was the launch of his products, but the fact that Sorkin now must pack in all the drama and relationships formed over a person’s life into three very specific events does get a bit maddening at times. Steve Jobs certainly didn’t have three life-defining conversations with CEO John Sculley, marketing director Joanna Hoffman, co-founder Steve Wozniak, and his estranged daughter Lisa Brennan at each of them, but I can understand why they were all included. This is a biopic after all, and Sorkin needs some human drama at the center of these tech talks. So while the bold new format to this biopic is certainly novel, it does require a bit of truth-stretching.

Luckily though, Steve Jobs is helped massively by scene after scene of predictably zippy and clever dialogue from Aaron Sorkin, all delivered by a massively talented cast. Michael Fassbender proves once again he is arguably the best actor working today, imitating Jobs’ high-pitched nasal voice but still managing to fully inhabit Jobs’ arrogant and calculating nature. Jeff Daniels is also an excellent casting as tepid CEO John Sculley, Jobs’ reluctant father figure in his turbulent time at Apple, and Seth Rogen is surprisingly confident as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

And while the film wants to explore Jobs’ up-and-down relationships with Sculley and Wozniak among others, ultimately this attempt to capture Jobs onscreen is about his fractured relationship with his illegitimate daughter Lisa, whom Jobs famously denied ever fathering for a number of years. It’s a relationship that is of course rife with potential for human drama, and Sorkin chooses to explore it as the biggest contradiction of Jobs’ life: that he himself likely felt rejected by his birth parents, but ultimately it took him a very long time to grasp that he was rejecting his own daughter in a similar way. It’s certainly the script’s most compelling element, even if I personally would’ve liked to see Jobs’ ultimately more important relationships with his wife and other children explored at least to a certain degree.

For such a dialogue-heavy film, Steve Jobs certainly needed some solid direction and Danny Boyle absolutely excels. Though its events take place entirely before the year 2000, Boyle's sensibilities lie fully in the 21st century, full of color and life that give so many scenes of backstage exchanges between two characters a crackling dynamism. Beautifully photographed by Boyle’s former Sunshine collaborator Alwin H. Küchler, Boyle’s direction gives Sorkin’s script the zip that it needs to separate itself from the pack. His use of frame inserts to invoke flashbacks, the brisk but clever transitions between all three acts, and his use of visuals to both convey information and illustrate Sorkin’s dialogue all turn what would’ve essentially been a well-acted stage play into something that’s gripping and totally cinematic.

I recommend that if you want the more real and nuanced portrait of the enigma that was Steve Jobs, pick up Walter Isaacson's excellent biography upon which this movie is supposedly based. But Steve Jobs the film is a vibrant fire-cracker take on the Hollywood biopic. Decidedly brisk but somehow managing to pack in a compelling amount of human drama into product launches, it's easily the most worthy portrayal of Jobs yet and probably the best we're going to get committed to screen. Confident direction from Boyle combined with a sizzling Sorkin script allows sparks to fly, even if some parts fizz out instead.