La La Land

My first, immediate impression upon watching this movie: if all the most popular kids in your high school got together and made a movie--a movie celebrating the most popular kids in your high school--it would look a lot like this. Later in the show, my impression...was pretty much the same thing. Admittedly, these would be fairly talented popular people making this movie, particularly the ones doing the art direction; this film always looks good, from start to finish. But it's just a little hard to believe Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as strugglers, especially long-term strugglers; they--he in particular--are just too pretty to make convincing losers. Yeah, that's right: if you strip away all the bright and sunny, or even the drama, this really is a story about losers who only eventually become winners. It's all a little hard to digest. Especially all the people that happy about being stuck in traffic. But there's entertainment here; certainly some good songs and music. It's just not the work of genius it was made out to be.