La La Land

Like many others, I’m sure; this review begins with a clarification. No, more a resigned confession: I’ve never been one for movie musicals. There have been some exceptions every now and then, including but not limited to Moulin Rouge, Dream Girls and 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.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock since the film’s first appearance at the Venice film festival, Damien Chazelle 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.

Yeah, I’ve never found myself attached to the glorification of  the grand heritage La La Land is so clearly besotted with, but the two sequences paying homage to Rebel Without a Cause caught my attention. In relation to Gosling, I suppose I should put another of my long-held prejudices 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, and here, too, his hazy gaze speaks to something authentic: the far-reaching mind of a dreamer.

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’…Chazelle knows we’re too cynical to buy a total lovesick ode to Tinseltown right now, so peppers the sweet with spice. I could understand why the film makes certain moves towards the flip-side of fairy tales but found that the nostalgic undertone of the film as a whole reeked of insincerity.

An ear-worm of a soundtrack, astounding visuals, 'loveable' stars and a surprisingly textured narrative - it's no wonder why Hollywood is praising this film. It's everything the industry loves - itself! Personally, I think I would enjoy the film more on a second viewing but can't seem to find the time to suffer through it all again.

Passengers

Morten Tyldum’s new film offers neither acid-bleeding monsters nor iron-fisted galactic empires, but the simple passage of time. Chris Pratt stars as engineer Jim Preston, one of five-thousand passengers of the starship Avalon, your bog-standard ark-in-space vessel designed somewhere between a wind turbine and the Endurance ship from Interstellar, with constant malfunctions. One of these glitches raises Jim too early from a hypersleep to which he cannot return, leaving him with 90 years alone, and long dead before the Avalon reaches its destination. After a year spent luxuriating in the more premium areas of the ship and pondering his plight with Michael Sheen’s legless robo-barman, Jim forcibly awakens fellow passenger Aurora, played by Jennifer Lawrence, for company, knowing full well that he is denying her a future. The question soon becomes a matter of what will shatter the couple’s serene sham of a relationship first: Jim’s secret or the multitude of problems plaguing the ship?

That all sounds very complex, but, essentially, it’s two very attractive people on a very attractive spaceship living a very attractive lifestyle surrounded by very attractive production design, backed by a very attractive score. Any intriguing or challenging ideas raised by the undeniably creepy premise are soon buried beneath its super-shiny surface. It’s a shame, because Tyldum’s dealt with somewhat subversive material before and come out on top.

Now, I'm as happy as anybody to watch Pratt and Lawrence swanning around ludicrously pretty sets, going on space walks and going on dates to see Michael Sheen, but, let’s be honest, both of them could have done this in their sleep: he’s very good at looking a bit smug and cuddly, she’s very good at crying in despair. By the film's very nature as multiplex fodder, there's no need for either to do much besides 'be themselves, but in space'.

And yet, I still feel a little let down by both, Pratt in particular. I’d really love to see what he could do with something outside his recently acquired comfort zone, but once again I’ve been left wanting. The first third of the movie is Jim by himself and just when things are looking suitably grim, Passengers wimps out and Jim’s obsession with Aurora is played for an ‘aww’, not an ‘eww’. Just when you think a discussion on male entitlement or the definition of murder is rearing up, it cowers instead. 

So, if it’s no good as a moral treatise, does it work as a cheerful holiday sci-fi? Well, the special effect set pieces are nice and the climax survives with minimal eye-rolling sentimentality, but a top-notch Thomas Newman score aside, there’s nothing that original going on, with many sequences feeling like half-hearted impressions of better movies. In a serious error of judgement, Tyldum attempts to evoke both Interstellar (time as the enemy, the psychological effects of being alone in space for years on end) and Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (the transit of a spaceship across the sun, only here it’s less reflective pause, more date night). It’s a collection of sci-fi bits n’ bobs slotted together into a uniformly attractive whole that trades darkness and debate for smiles and CGI.