La La Land

Photo: Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, watching a movie and each other, in La-La Land. From popmatters.com, just click here. The photo below is from the same page.

Disclaimer: Here there be spoilers. Consider yourself forewarned. If you want to see the movie, you might want to wait to read this.

My better half and I saw La-La Land recently, mostly because she's seen some "guy films" recently and I owed her one. She said I like depressing, serious films, so I should see this movie, which she said would be a happy musical. I offered the opinion that she would be surprised, that I had a feeling that all would not be well. Unfortunately, I was right about this.

It is a very good musical about going for your dreams--and the price you have to pay. There ain't nothin' free in this world, right? The movie's buzz has overplayed the feel-good vibe it sometimes has, and has vastly underplayed the sad ending, when both accomplish their dreams, but realize, perhaps, that they aren't completely happy. (Though, at the end, she seems happier than he does. But, I have to ask, perhaps in ignorance: If you're crazy about everything jazz, can you be happy? What draws people to a music genre that sounds, to me [again, perhaps in my ignorance], as unhappy and sad?) This note of sadness is especially surprising for Mia--Emma Stone's character--who has a husband and child at that point, but who looks back, wistfully, at the guy she left behind. The closing scenes, where Ryan Gosling's character plays in his head the emotions and relationship with Mia that might have been--and that would have been in the feel-good musical romances of MGM's past, which La-La Land respectfully emulates--are very touching and very sad. I walked out of the theater even more affected and sad than I thought I'd be.

When Gosling's Sebastian convinces Stone's Mia to go back and try out for a movie role she'd been singled out for--and when one of the people at the audition mentions it'll be a 3-4 month shoot in Paris (this is actually on the short side of many shoots)--I could see how the stars were aligning. And the irony being set up: If he doesn't convince her to go to the audition, she doesn't get the role. If she doesn't get the role, she doesn't go to Paris and perhaps they don't permanently break up. He knows this, as he'd previously been on the road a lot and she had suffered for it. (Though, to be fair, he'd stayed loyal and returned as happily and as often as he could to her.) So by convincing her to go for her dreams, he's showing that he loves her. And so because he loves her, he loses her. Such is life, especially if you live in La-La Land, figuratively and literally. (You know, how dreamers just think la-la-la-la-la and live in La-La Land? Get it? [My father used to say that to me all the time, usually when I was writing.] I had to explain that to someone recently, about what that means, and that it's not just another nickname for Los Angeles.)

I really appreciated the theme of going for your dreams, despite the immense rejection and obstacles that will come your way. I'm the only artist (I write stories and novels and tons of other things) and dreamer I know, so it's very frustrating to share my sadness and despair in the face of rejection. I don't know anyone else that well who can understand what it feels like to spend 20 years writing a novel that doesn't sell. And getting scammed when you're 21 by an "agent." (I was very heart-warmed to see that Gosling's character had also been scammed.) Nobody I know can relate.

I haven't been as brave as La-La Land's characters. I haven't gone all-out without a safety net. I've got a great career and benefits now, and I write when I can. I feel I'm too safe, too soft, to content and satisfied with my measly sales. But that all could've been different in my early-20s, when I was writing and floundering, and nobody was feeling me. Maybe I wouldn't have stopped writing for 9 years if I'd had someone then to talk to, to understand. I'd be a published novelist now with those 9 non-writing years back. (I know now that it's more my fault for letting the scam agent stop me than it was the scammer's for scamming me.) I didn't have a Mia at that time, or a Sebastian to come get me, to have confidence in me to keep me going.

But I digress. I think. Maybe not, for the message of the movie is to keep going, to try to achieve your dreams. And you'll have to accept the consequences as well. The ending of this movie reminded me of the ending to a depressing folksy song from the 70s. The end refrain mentions that "she wanted to be an actress / and I wanted to learn to fly." (Please leave a comment if you know the title.) Both in the song achieve their dreams, sort of: She's an unhappy trophy wife and he's an unhappy cabbie. She's an actress, because she has to act happy, and act like she loves her husband and her life. He has learned to fly, but as the end of the song goes: "I fly / so high / when I'm stoned." Well, La-La Land's characters aren't stoned (and let's not fall back on a stereotype about jazz musicians and drugs), but they aren't exactly happy, either. Not. At. All.

So go see this movie, but don't believe all the overhyped whimsy of this film. There is some, but I'm here to tell ya, this movie, in a way, is more depressing to me than the serious, depressing films I'm accused of preferring.

Do I really believe this movie is as sad as, say, Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan?

Yup. Yes I do.

Super 8

Photo: Movie poster, from its Wikipedia site

See this movie on cable for the story, the emotion, the great framed shots, the special effects, and the film nostalgia. It pays homage, in ways small and large, to the following films:

--E.T.

--Close Encounters

--The Thing (the original, according to Roger Ebert's 3 1/2 star review; I only saw Carpenter's 1982 film version)

--The Goonies

--The Blob (bad 80s version)

--Aliens

--Every teenage schmaltzy 80s movie with a girl with a bad father.  Say Anything comes to mind here.  So does Forrest Gump (I know that's a 90s film), but in a much different way.

--Every schmaltzy 50s movie with a town taken over by an alien, and the army takes over, and there's a professor (called "perfessor") somewhere, acting goofy.

--The Abyss

--The Stand (Okay, that's a miniseries, but still very much there)

--Every so-bad-it's-good zombie movie, including Night of the Living Dead

--Independence Day

This movie, essentially, is a combination, mostly, of The Goonies, E.T. and Close Encounters, with an alien that's a little Aliens, a little Independence Day, and a little Close Encounters (with the boy at the end) and a little Starman, too, I suppose.  And, of course, all he wants to do is get back home, like E.T.  But he strings up townspeople for food, a la Aliens, and kills quite a few of them, and the Air Force guys (usually in movies like this, they're Army guys), a la Aliens, and The Thing, but without the paranoia and Cold War social discourse.

I could re-write this blog entry and come up with a completely different homage-summary, and still be correct with that, too.  In fact, I have to throw in a tiny bit of Jaws, for the community-meeting thing run by the sheriff, and, now that I think about it, a tiny bit of Red Dawn and The Thing, because a woman stands up at this meeting and insists that the recent power outages and power-source thefts were due to "the Soviets."

I wonder if teens today would enjoy this as much as folks my age, and older.  I think they might--but not as much.  Too bad for them.  For God's sake, finally something good comes with getting older.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkein

I suspect that I wouldn't have anything more to say about the plot and themes, for you, because if you're reading this, you've read the books or seen the movies already.  I could go into a few changes from one to the other, but I won't put such disclaimers here.  Instead, I was interested in Tolkien's writing choices, as I was in the review for the FOTR.  Here, Tolkien basically splits the book in half: the first half to Aragorn and Gandalf; the second half to Frodo and Sam and Gollum.  I know that Tolkien wrote the "trilogy" all at once, not intending for breaks, and that his publishers took that volume of about 1,000 pages and split it into threes.  This leads to what sometimes look to be odd writing choices, but considering the big 1,000 book, really isn't.  In other words, it looks like Tolkien wasn't going back and forth with his narration between the two groups of heroes--most other authors would have.  It looks like he split the second book between the two groups and did not go back and forth between them.  But it only looks that way, since it's 398 pages.  But if you think of the three books all as one, he does, in fact, go back and forth--just for several hundred pages at a time between the groups.  So, as in Elf-land and Middle Earth in general, that which seems to be is not.

Also of note was a comment from Sam on page 325.  Boromir's brother has been chastising Frodo and questioning him hard; Sam gets slowly angry at this and finally responds--but mentions they have the ring.  He realizes his verbal goof and says to Faramir that he has spoken and behaved handsomely so far, and he should continue to do so after Sam's gaffe.  Part of that retort was, "But handsome is as handsome does, we say."  Substitute "handsome" for "stupid," and you've got Forrest Gump.  Tolkien's work stretches far.

The last thing I'll note is the very obvious bearing Beowulf had on Tolkein.  The swords and such, the fighting, the horns on everything, the righteous in battle stuff, the putting of the dead on water, and so much more there isn't room to mention.  But if anyone knows LOTR: TTT and Beowulf, you can't miss the fact that Shelob is a direct descendent of the She-hag in Beowulf (and maybe a tiny bit of Grendel, too).

One work, one deed, leads to another.  Such as it is in Middle-Earth; such as it is here.