La La Land

Damien Chazelle's follow up to his acclaimed 2014 film Whiplash follows along with his theme of trying to achieve your dreams in the entertainment industry, but with a lot more in the way of singing and dancing. Chazelle also makes a comment about the nature of Hollywood and the way that it treats the young people who go there looking for stardom. As we saw with Whiplash, he is also more than capable when it comes to putting music in movies.

Mia (Emma Stone) is an aspiring actress struggling to get even small roles as she drifts from audition to audition with girls who look exactly like her. She goes to Hollywood parties in the hopes of being spotted by a producer. Mia keeps running into Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist who is trying very hard to be taken seriously despite playing Christmas carols at bars and 80s pop songs at parties. Eventually the pair strike up a relationship and soon deviate from their respective dreams as they realise life works differently than they intended.

La La Land is an amazing movie that despite being set in the modern day, has the feeling like it could be set in any time period as the story it tells is one that started when Hollywood was born. The dream of making it in Hollywood is one that so many have tried and a lot more have failed than succeeded. Chazelle based this film on his own experiences he had when he first moved to Hollywood and the struggles he had. I'm glad that the romantic elements of this film aren't made a priority, because while they are a good way to movie the story forward, it would be a bore to have this film be about the romance. In a way, both characters are more in love with their dreams than they are with each other. This is the third time that Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling have starred together and their chemistry is undeniable. Both play wholly enjoyable characters who are a delight to watch,

Chazelle is fantastic at integrating music into his films, so it is only reasonable that he try his hand at making a musical (although it isn't fully a musical). Justin Hurwitz's score beautifully compliments the big song and dance numbers and while there are basically only three different music variations (apart from the songs), they just work so well. There is also some amazing camera work done during the songs and they play exactly like a Hollywood musical from the 50s or 60s. I do have a few gripes with the musical aspect of this film. The third act is largely devoid of any musical numbers and relies solely on regular story in tying up the film. I get that it was the darker period for the characters, but you can still convey that through song. The other thing is that singer-songwriter John Legend has a small role in the film and I felt like he could have had more songs, because the ones he did have didn't display his talents.

La La Land is just a fun and enjoyable movie, especially to see at the end of a year that hasn't been too good. It is joyful and optimistic right up to the end, where it gets a little heartbreaking as we see the whole movie through the eyes of what might have been.

Men, Women & Children

Beginning with the Voyager probe drifting through space as Emma Thompson narrates, Jason Reitman's Men, Women & Children opens with a lot of scope, though my primary worry walking into  this ensemble piece, was if it would actually provide an intriguing dialogue on our technologically connected lives or simply be forced along by cliched themes.

Chris Truby (Travis Tope) is a porn-addicted teenager whose parents, Don (Adam Sandler) and Helen (Rosemarie DeWitt) are having marriage issues, and begin to form their own relationships behind each others backs. Chris is attracted to Hannah Clint (Olivia Crocicchia), a self-obsessed teenager who is attempting to become famous through any means necessary, be it reality television or the racy modelling website she runs with her mother, Joan (Judy Greer). One of Hannah's friends, Allison (Elena Kampouris) is so determined to attract her love-interest that she puts herself on an extreme diet that transforms her to borderline anorexic.

Tim Mooney (Ansel Elgort), another student at the school, has quit the football team, against his father's (Dean Norris) wishes. Tim is dealing with abandonment issues (his mother left both him and his father to chase another man to L.A) by immersing himself in an online video game, Guild Wars. Eventually Tim gains the attention of Brandy Beltmeyer (Kaitlyn Dever) who is similarly dislocated from the world around her due to her mother's (Jennifer Garner) controlling attitude to her use of the Internet. Much of the story is told through text messages and digital on-screen overlays that attempt to highlight our society's reliance on, and immersion in social media, with both positive and negative consequences.

This film could be more accurately described as Sex, Teenagers & Pornography. It's up there with the Wolf of Wall Street in sexual references (although obviously a vastly different context) and whilst it does begin to focus more on the men and the women towards the end, the vast majority of it plays out as a teenage driven story about sexual experiences, pregnancy, anorexia, divorce, video games...the list goes on. Whilst these themes work well in the various character arcs, it's not as if they haven't been explored before...many times...even by Reitman himself. The use of on-screen messages to convey certain moments of the story often works beautifully and is one of the (sadly few) defining features of Men, Women & Children.

With a large cast of fantastic actors, and Adam Sandler, Men, Women & Children certainly doesn't have any issues with creating believable characters. Dean Norris was a standout for me as Kent, the troubled father who becomes more and more dissociated with his son. Jennifer Garner is fine, despite playing a soulless and generally uninteresting character. J.K. Simmons is fantastic yet completely underused in his small role, and as much as I may joke about him, Adam Sandler is surprisingly strong as Don, one of the more interesting characters out of the adults.

Just as strong though, are the teenagers, who really do dominate this film. Travis Tope and Ansel Elgort, whilst playing very different characters, both provide fantastic performances. Crocicchia and Kampouris are similarly playing roles at separate ends of the spectrum, and although they're both very good, Allison is a far more interesting character than the vain Hannah.

Men, Women & Children  is another of Reitman's social commentaries, and whilst the formula may be well and truly worn by now, the all-round fantastic performances and interesting use of social media themes save it from falling completely flat.

Kill The Messenger

Movies about journalists stumbling onto conspiracies involving the government come along far too long for my liking. And when you watch them, they always seem over the top, filled with action sequences and other things that never happened to the real people. Kill The Messenger, however, doesn't rely on these theatrics to get people engaged. It uses a gripping true story that is hard to comes to terms with because the real world implications are terrifying.

Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner) is a journalist who works for the San Jose Mercury News. He finds out about a conspiracy that involves the CIA wilfully letting drug dealers sell crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles in order to fund a revolution in Nicaragua that it backs. Webb writes an explosive three-part story that gets everyone riled up. He then has to deal with people attacking his ethics and whether or not the story is true.

This movie takes an interesting approach to the way the history is shown. While the story of Webb and his investigation goes on, the film sometimes cuts away to media footage from the time as well as film taken of the actors as though they were in the 90s. Although this is a fun technique, I found at times that it was slightly distracting.

Jeremy Renner dominates this movie. I know that he is the star, but there is never a scene where he isn't there. I feel that with a movie like this there should be at least one or two scenes where we don't need to see the lead actor. Mary Winstead is amazing as Gary's editor who really wants him to succeed, but feels pressure from her bosses.

Apart from these two actors, everyone else features intermittently or dropped a couple of scenes after they have served their purpose. Barry Pepper, Michael Sheen and Michael K. Williams are all fantastic actors who appear for a scene or two, but their characters are underdeveloped, especially Williams, who plays drug dealer "Freeway" Rick Ross, a man who probably deserves a movie to be made about his own life.

Verdict: A decent movie that tells a part of history that everybody would already know about, hopefully. Not essential watching.