I love my avocation of watching and writing about movies — yet sometimes it pains me when I do not connect with a movie or a trend that other people adore.  Such is the case with the new romantic fantasy musical La La Land.  This is the leading Golden Globe nominee for 2016, and a film that currently has an 8.9 rating (out of ten) on IMDb’s rating scale.  You might consider me Scrooge in this case because while I recognize and applaud this film’s unique qualities, its audacious style, its genuine love of music and its nostalgic feel — I just don’t like it very much.  Bah humbug, say I.

Damien Chazelle’s musical is, I believe, a perfect example of why some people don’t like musicals.  I love musicals, and I don’t like this one.  The opening sequence, set on a crowded freeway traffic jam, featuring the number “Another Day in the Sun,” sets the tone.  People (not characters, since we don’t know any of them and will never see them again) hop out of their cars and proceed to sing and jump around.  The entire sequence felt terribly forced; the song was forgettable, the singing no better than adequate, the choreography clumsy and frenetic.  It just felt awkward, and much of the film carried the same feel, for the same reasons, for me.  The film gets better at balancing its fantastic elements with its realism yet it remains an uneasy mix throughout.

The story is basic Hollywood hokum, true and tragic though it may be.  Two young and hopeful artistic types, piano playing Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and actress Mia (Emma Stone), grow weary of their dreams failing and fading until they meet, prop each other up, fall in love and finally find success — yet find that success comes with a cost.  There is nothing new or novel about this idea, but writer-director Chazelle jazzes things up in every possible way, including sequences that defy gravity, alter time, espouse alternative story lines and generally challenge the traditional ways in which stories are told.  The way that La La Land is told, mixing dollops of nostalgia with movie and musical history into a contemporary romance in which success is fleeting and costly, done in a dynamic visual style and tuned to a jazzy soundtrack, reminded me of a Baz Luhrmann journey, ala Moulin Rouge.  I didn’t like that movie much, either.

Music is crucial in a film like this, and here composer Justin Hurwitz and lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul have done pretty well.  They contribute about five songs; one of them, “City of Stars,” is remarkable.  John Legend has a supporting role and plays a song as well.  It is the music that holds the film together.  But I have to say this; neither Ryan Gosling nor Emma Stone are professional singers, and the film suffers from that fact.  The choreography, by Mandy Moore, does not help.  The old MGM musicals worked because their musical numbers were polished and perfected before they were ever filmed.  These numbers seem extemporaneous, and while that may be an advantage to the story, it also makes them clunky and unsophisticated.  Clearly this was the director’s choice; I guess I simply prefer the old-fashioned style.

It genuinely pains me to pan a film this different from the norm.  I want fresh and original features; nobody needs to see another Transformers clone (we will in about five months).  Filmmakers, especially young ones, should feel free to experiment and make whatever they feel appropriate.  La La Land is an audacious film, and that should be applauded.  But it also plays fast and loose with nostalgia (much like The Artist), it has unimportant secondary characters who fly in and out of the film with little impact, it becomes painfully serious (and non-fantastic) for about an hour in the middle and the ending will be sure to disappoint many viewers.  In short, this is a real mixed bag and, despite some real rewards, it just didn’t work very well for me.  I went with my wife Barb, who liked it, and her mother Ruth, who loved it.  That’s great, and I hope other viewers will enjoy it more than I did.  ☆ ☆ 1/2.  28 December 2016.