Ah, Hollywood! The magic, the romance, the city of angels: Los Angeles. Secretly we all know that Hollywood’s not a real place. Hollywood’s a dream and creative ideal combined and it’s a world captured picture-perfectly by Damien Chazelle’s first work since his Oscar-winning Whiplash from 2014. La La Land tells the tale of aspiring starlet Mia (Emma Stone) and jazz wannabe Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) in an all singing, all dancing tribute to those cockle-warming classics of the mid-twentieth century.
2016, sorry to break this to you pal but you’ve not been the best year. Politics, international relations, conflicts and all those celebrity deaths? You’ve got to admit that you’ve dropped the ball a bit.
On the other hand…I suppose you have given us a pretty solid year on the film front. I mean: The Revenant, Spotlight and Room all in one month?! We were spoilt! You’ve been pretty on form with the animations this year: Finding Dory, Moana, Kubo and the Two Strings, Zootropolis – perhaps best not to mention Sausage Party. Your blockbusters were a bit more hit and miss: Captain America was a corker and The Jungle Book was stunning – bravo. Then you gave us Suicide Squad. Seriously 2016? D- for that one, must try harder.
Way back, in the wake of directing 2009’s Princess and the Frog, Ron Clements and John Musker were lining up an adaptation of Terry Prachett’s Mort as their next enterprise. Prachett feels an unusual inspiration to add to the Magic Kingdom but an interesting one all the same. Whilst, alas, that grubby business of rights got in the way of poor Mort, the film the pair have produced instead puts Disney on much safer ground.
The Film Blog 