Way back in my film school days, I had an interaction with a favorite cousin whom I had not seen in some time. This opportunity to reconnect saw our first interaction since I had been accepted as a film student, and so he asked me what basically everyone asks me right after I tell them I’m studying film, “So, like what’s your favorite movie, then?” When approached with this question, at least by associates who are not necessarily film buffs, my default response is usually something I know has been on Netflix in the last year. (Though if I had to pick an answer ... maybe Silver Linings Playbook .) I think this time I said James Cameron’s Titanic . He then had a sort of illuminated reaction and followed up with, “I see, so you like … old movies.” My response to this was something in the vein of, “Well, yes , but NOOOO …” Steven Spielberg being a 29-year-old on the set of Jaws In academic circles, t he demarcation between “c...
Yes, fellas. Your calendar is correct. We are, in fact, 10 years out from La La Land . My main point of interest in Damien Chazelle’s groundbreaking 2016 musical has historically been its role in helping set off the sort of stealth renaissance of musicals we’ve been experiencing the last ten years where we all try to see how big we can make the genre before anyone notices. Chazelle explained at the time , “Now more than ever we need hope and romance on the screen, and I think there’s something about musicals that just get at something that only movies can do. That idea of movies as a dreamland, movies as the language of our dreams and movies as a way of expressing a world in which you break into song, that emotions can violate the rules of reality.” The hook for this film, though, is very much the film’s ultimate rejection of the traditional happy ending for which musicals are so well known. That is the reason why...