Films and Feelings

    It's fun to consider whether or not you chose your friends or whether they chose you, particularly when it seems you and your friends have nothing in common.      That's certainly true of Raissa and Jo, the protagonists of Dreamworks' newest film, but they are nonetheless determined to keep hold of one another, and have been since one fateful meeting outside the principal's office when they were kids--even as Raissa's looming departure for college across the seas threatens to tear them apart. The night before Raissa leaves, forces beyond their control draw Jo and Raissa to Nakali, the Forgotten Island from the stories Jo's grandmother told them as children. It's a dream come true.       But this island's magic is mysterious.  Jo and Raissa wake up on the beach and realize they have approximately 12 hours unaccounted for. Moreover, they had a ticket home, but its location is buried somewhere in that time gap, in memories lost. Trying ...

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...