It's the kind of movie you'd have to be a dick not to like, but that being said, I feel like I admired it more than actually enjoyed it. Much like the director's previous and good-but-inferior WHIPLASH, it's astonishingly well-made with long takes and impressive choreography. And with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone at the helm, it certainly doesn't lack in charm. But it is so caught up in its technical prowess that it suffers a bit in its heart, similarly to best picture winner BIRDMAN. The main difference is that LA LA LAND is a good film whereas the quality of the Inñáritu film is questionable, at best.

In case you've been living under a rock, LA LA LAND is a musical in the style of '50s Technicolor extravaganzas with splashes of Douglas Sirk and Busby Berkeley. The film centers around a musician (Gosling) whose career is on the rise as he falls in love with a struggling actress (Stone) who is doubting her own abilities. It is an interestingly odd combination of revolution and throwback. In the revolutionary sense, musicals are very rarely made anymore; in the throwback sense, it's like '50s musicals to a T. While this clash may not necessarily be bad (it's certainly superior to the experimentation of Scorsese's NEW YORK, NEW YORK), it lends the film a certain toothlessness, a little too much "look at me" instead of "feel for me."

Mind you, I'd still cut off my own arm to direct a film half as good, but it's not the 21st century masterpiece I was expecting it to be. Maybe it's because I was expecting it to be more than hollow fluff which, again, is not necessarily bad. I wouldn't want cotton candy to taste like Jiro's sushi. It's clearly made by very smart people and while the (you know the one) last sequence of the film made almost everyone in the theater cry, it left me dry-eyed. And mind you, I cried in CAST AWAY. That damn volleyball.