The Film is the Answer

This is going to be a pretty experiential post borne of the felicitous combination of media that I have been exposed to over the last couple of weeks. So if you’re expecting some kind of high-minded analysis of film style and what not… er… you probably won’t find that so much in this post. This one’s gonna be more stream of consciousness as I drift from one title to the next.

So last week I finished watching Man to Man (Apr-Jun 2017, 16 episodes) starring Park Hae-jin, Park Sung-woong, and Kim Min-jung. The series is written by Kim Won-suk of Descendants of the Sun (Feb-Apr 2016, 16 episodes) fame, and directed by Lee Chang-min. First off, it’s definitely got the same black-ops military guy falling in love with a plain Jane trope going on that we last saw in Descendants. But personally, I felt it was a little more coherent and consistent in the character development.

I never said this out loud but I thought Descendants had some trouble balancing the plot and the romance halves of the series. I enjoyed the two-episode story arcs but I found the romance in Descendants tedious. Conversely, I think Man to Man is more fun because it’s more plot heavy. It has the established TV series plot structure that one is more familiar with in American dramas that typically features the “interplay between the demands of episodic and serial storytelling” (Mittell 19). This involves the “interweaving [of] long-term story arcs within the frameworks of clearly defined episodic parameters” (Mittell 20).

To give you a bit of context, Man to Man has a larger story arc that involves the main character, Ghost Agent K (Park Hae-jin), covertly investigating how his predecessor was killed and tracking down the wooden statues which hold the key to his final message. But the episodes themselves are broken up into various “missions” that bring him closer to resolving the main narrative arc. Then peppered throughout these smaller “mission” story arcs, there’s a bit of romance sprinkled in on the side. Conversely, Descendants always struck me more as smaller episodic arcs that are hung on the main narrative which IS the romance plot between the two leads.

I’m probably going to sound like I’m contradicting myself here, but the next thing I really liked about Man to Man is that it doesn’t take itself so seriously. It’s filled with McGuffins that provide just enough forward momentum for the plot from episode to episode but the bulk of the entertainment comes from some very amusing character relationships that thankfully did not all centre on the romance between the male and female lead. I particularly enjoyed the bromance between Ghost K/Kim Sul-woo and Hallyu superstar Park Woon-gwang (Park Sung-woong). And I thought the Undercover Agent-Handler relationship between Ghost K and Lee Dong-hyun (Jeong Man-sik) was portrayed very feelingly.

I think a lot of the enjoyment I got out of this series also stemmed from how Park Hae-jin seemed to be self-reflexively playing against type. Let me explain. If every Hallyu star got reduced down to a specific, signature quality they had, Park Hae-jin’s would be his dead eyes. Those dead staring eyes have landed him a whole slew of psychopathic/sociopathic characters, so much so that he has been typecast.

[Seriously, he was a sympathetic secondary villain in Doctor Stranger (May-Jul 2014, 20 episodes), a very believable “psychopath” in Bad Guys (Oct-Dec 2014, 11 episodes), and a possibly sociopathic male lead in Cheese in the Trap (Jan-Mar 2016, 16 episodes).]

Man, it’s high time that guy caught a break cuz Mmm! He looks good enough to eat! And while the first couple of episodes really foreground him as a lie-detector defeating cool customer who works in the National Intelligence Service’s (NIS) Ghost programme (the NIS’ version of Treadstone/Blackbriar), the rest of the series sees him playing a standard Kdrama romantic lead.

Anyway, the thing about this Kdrama that really caught my attention is how for the longest time in the second half of the series, I thought the series was moving towards a Coen Brothers-esque conclusion. By this I mean I thought it was going to conclude with a self-reflexive, genre-breaking twist where the stymied production of a romance flick for Hallyu star, Park Woon-gwang, becomes the answer to the systemic corruption within the NIS.

The kind of generic twist I’m thinking about would put the Kdrama in the company of Hollywood films like The Nice Guys (2016), Argo (2012), Inglourious Basterds (2009) (the irony that none of these films are written or directed by the Coen Brothers does not escape me… -_-“). But in these three films, the films featured within the films are literally the answer to resisting oppression, corruption, and saving the day.

Just a quick run down of what I mean by the film being the answer in the three films I reference above:

• the porn film in the canister everyone is chasing in The Nice Guys is spliced with  damning footage about the corruption within the car and gas industry
• in Argo the film production is the pretext used to disguise the extraction of six Americans held hostage in Iran by militants in 1979
• and in a historical revisionist, wish-fulfilment sequence in Inglourious Basterds, a Jewish woman splices a film with footage of herself mocking Hitler and his high-ranking Nazis into a special screening for said people. She mocks them from the screen, they come to the realisation that they are trapped in a theatre and destined to burned to death.

The level of self-reflexivity, if Man to Man had used the Romance film to dismantle the corruption, would have really hit the sweet spot for me because that level of self-reflexivity would have transformed Man to Man into a non-representational drama capable of abstracting, fragmenting, and foregrounding the materials and processes of the genre (Stam 151). In so doing, it would have carried out the Brechtian function of self-reflexivity of “laying bare society’s causal network” (qtd. in Stam 153), to expose a culturally and historically determinate set of conventions to do with romance. Because, make no mistake, Romance in Kdrama is a key export from S. Korea.

Instead, the series opted for a slight shift in genre by using a live television broadcast to entrap the villains. While it’s a very slight shift in TV genre (because I mean whether it’s a film, a talkshow, a drama, it’s all still media), I felt this made the series somewhat less satisfying because the plot did not quite return full circle to comment on the formalistic elements of the controlling TV genre that the Kdrama itself takes.

To continue with this theme of the film being the answer, it so happened that upon finishing Man to Man, I was looking for something else to watch and I stumbled upon Silenced (2011). This film is also known as Do-ga-ni and The Crucible.

Now here’s a film in which the film is literally the answer. Dogani is based on a book of the same title published in 2009 about the egregious abuse of students between 2000-2005 that went on in Gwangju Inhwa School, a school set up for the hearing-impaired.

The horror behind this event is two-fold. After the actual physical and sexual abuse nine (but many suspect more) students of the school were repeatedly subjected to over the course of five years, when a human rights group finally managed to bring the case to court, the guilty parties were given sentences so embarrassingly light that it boggles the mind that there was not more of a public outcry when the initial news broke. Even the publication of the whistleblower’s account of ongoings in the school in 2009 barely caused a ripple.

Instead, it was only after the wide release of Dogani in local theaters in 2011, and after it was watched by more than 4 million S. Koreans, that there was any reaction to this horrifying tale. Shortly after the film, a bill dubbed the ‘Dogani bill’ was passed unanimously into law. The bill got rid of the statute of limitations on cases of rape involving minors and the handicapped, and increased the sentences for those convicted of such a crime. More on the Dogani Law.

In the case of Dogani, the film became the answer because it is a socially responsible narrative told well. While not perfect, there are a few sequences in the film that, formalistically, really stand out.

The first time one of the girls gives her account of what happened to her, the film shifts into an internally focalised representation of her experience in a very subtle and effective manner. Initially, as Yeon-Doo (Kim Hyun-soo) gives her account, the main character, Kang In-ho (Gong Yoo) has to translate her sign language and speak on her behalf. This scene is dense with meaning because as she delivers her account, In-ho’s voice fades out and the visual narrative takes over. This is as if her version of events take precedence, and the audience is made privy to her words and her thoughts are made concrete and no longer filtered through a male voice. A male voice that is made additionally problematic because her assailant is male and her close encounter in a  prior scene was only interrupted but not averted by In-ho who almost walks in on them.

In other internally focalised sequences with minors recounting what happened to them, the film very effectively plays with sound. For example, when a hearing-impaired child walks inexorably towards the sickening source of the sound of the wet slap of flesh on flesh – the drawn out use of dramatic irony is enough to make audiences squirm in their seats.

Perhaps the best achievement of the film was the way it foregrounded cultural and social reasons for the lack of initial response to these heinous crimes. The small town mindset, the ways in which bureaucracy effaces the individual and numbs a person, the social pressures faced by some of the characters just trying to survive made everyone into easy prey, and made everyone complicit in letting the rich and powerful have free reign. A lot of these come across most convincingly in Kang In-ho’s struggle to do the right thing. As a recently widowed man, with a sick child, he needed this job at the school. Needed it enough that he wavered on whether he too should turn a blind eye to these crimes.

There is one particular shot of the character being crushed into a small corner of the frame during a memorial service for his late wife. The double framing drastically shrinks the space within the frame of the shot. Then in the foreground, taking up most of the space, is the table laden with offerings for his late wife. In the background is In-ho’s child coughing up a lung while being soothed by her grandmother. And In-ho sits, freshly weighted down with this new knowledge about the school and its odious administrators, spine bent almost double. In a single frame is all his troubles crowded around him.

Also in this film, I witnessed one of the more effective uses of slow motion in a Korean film or television series. After being berated by his mother for trying to save others when he can’t even save himself, there is a shot of In-ho walking in slow-motion to the corrupt principal’s office carrying an office plant. The door opens and the occupants are physically abusing a young boy in plain view. There was something about the shot where In-ho gets beckoned into the principal’s office in slow motion, himself a good-looking young man, that makes him look like a potential rape victim too. It is the sad story of reality, where no matter how much older or more adult you get, you’re still getting raped by the system and those with more power than you.

The parting shot of the film was also particularly well done, bearing in mind of course that at the time of the making of the film, the Dogani Law had not even been written yet. The film closes on a poignant shot of a travel ad for the city of Mujin with the tagline “a city of fog.”

If you haven’t seen it before, the film is definitely worth a watch. It’s thoughtfully made and doesn’t let its subject matter down. It was also great to read about how it resulted in social change as well.

Works Cited:

Mittell, Jason. “Complexity in Context.” Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press, 2015. 17-54.

Stam, Robert. Introduction to Film Theory. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.

 

 

The Two Endings of Wonder Woman (2017)

When I was watching Wonder Woman (2017) last Sunday evening, I couldn’t help but think about Linda Williams’ essay on melodrama to rationalise what happened at the end. From what I hear it is the ending that tripped up an otherwise well-plotted, well-paced film about a female superhero that “little girls” all around the world have been eagerly anticipating.

Spoilers ahead.

If we examine the ending of the film, Diana (Gal Gadot) actually kills Ares twice. The first time she kills a pseudo-Ares and expects the entire weapons facility to stop loading up Dr. Poison’s (Elena Anaya) deadly mustard-gas-on-steroids bombs into the plane. Except they don’t.

Then the real Ares reveals himself to her and they fight. As she fights him, she suddenly hears Steve Trevor’s (Chris Pine) last words to her and draws strength from them. She defeats Ares in an amazing light show of flying fists charged with lightning and the German soldiers are freed of Ares’ influence.

The second ending didn’t go over well with critics. The question is why?

Linda Williams, in her essay “Melodrama Revised,” built on arguments made by Peter Brooks and Christine Gledhill that melodrama is more than just another genre. Melodrama is a kind of base mode that undergirds all genres. Evidence of the imbrication of melodrama across various genre is seen in the 5 characteristics of melodrama she delineates in her essay. I summarised them in a previous post and if you’re curious, you can go here and here.

With regards to Wonder Woman though, I want to concentrate on how at its core, melodrama is a search for and a desperate attempt to recoup a space of innocence. And in order to achieve this, the film will oftentimes overreach in order to achieve this. In the words of Linda Williams, “One of the key features of melodrama… is its compulsion to ‘reconcile the irreconcilable’ – that is, its tendency to find solutions to problems that cannot really be solved” (Williams 37).

At this point, the realism, or the filmic representation of the real that the film tries to pass off as THE REAL, breaks down.

Granted that Wonder Woman, as a superhero, is an element that is already in excess of the Real, within the construction of the film, there is a baseline of realism that the film, its plots, and its characters all come together to simulate. This can be in the form of emotional and psychological realism of the characters. For instance, Charles (Ewen Bremmer), the sniper from their merry band of fighters, is clearly established as someone who has been broken by the war.

Add to this that the film is a fictional revisioning of a key part of history, and Wonder Woman becomes a film with a specific register of realism. And it needs to adhere to this in order to be believable, in order for audiences to continue to suspend their disbelief. Unfortunately, in the second ending, the film overreaches. Quite drastically.

When a film overreaches in pursuit of the reconciliation of irreconcilable elements, it deploys all of its formalistic elements to this end. This includes:

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1. The sudden powering up of Diana accompanied by the over the top lightning show of CGI capabilities, a formalistic element that calls unnecessary attention to itself
2. Suddenly hearing Steve Trevor’s voice, which the HISHE reviewer (see below) points out she couldn’t possibly have because she was still suffering the after effects of the bomb blast
3. The swelling music
4. The idyllic scenery/pathetic fallacy – the rising sun, the breaking of dawn, the dawning of the new day – these are settings we have been taught to associate with a fresh start, a dispelling of evil
5. The minor characters’ reactions – the German soldiers are released from Ares’ influence. They take off their gas masks and we see their smiling faces

…in short, whatever it took to save the day. The end result is that the space of innocence is recuperated. Diana’s world view is confirmed and the war ends because Ares has been defeated.

Compare this to the first ending in which she mistakenly thinks she’s vanquished Ares. This is the point where Diana comes to a number of key realisations, all of which ring more true to the viewer that the ending we actually got…

1. Killing one key figure in a war may do nothing to stop it
2. The true extent of the mechanisation of war in WWI
   1. a precursor to Nazi compartmentalisation in the concentration camps in WWII that made it possible for ordinary people to do evil things – Excerpt from The Banality of Evil by Edward S. Herman
3. Mankind is inherently predisposed towards violence

The point at which melodrama overtakes realism in Wonder Woman is also marked by two other aspects in the film.

When she first encounters Ares, she sees him through a glass window. When she rushes inside the guard tower to confront him, he reappears outside. I choose to see this as a nod to the weepies of the 1930s & 40s – like Stella Dallas (1937), Mildred Pierce (1945) – a genre that was said to be a woman’s genre. It was also a genre that was full of women either looking out of windows wishing to be free, or looking into rooms through windows hoping to be part of something.

The other aspect that read as melodrama was the trite suggestion that love conquers all. The recourse to emotion, especially when there wasn’t very much of it in the film other than the romantic love shared by Steve Trevor and Diana, felt a little lightweight. The film didn’t establish any sort of love for all humanity, or pity for one’s enemy in its earlier scenes. Quite the contrary, the Amazonians had a fairly harsh attitude towards humanity, and Diana trashes a bunch of Germans without mercy in no man’s land. So the 180 she does at the end comes across as a little superficial.

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After comparing the two possible endings, it’s time to ask which is the real ending.

I was kinda taken by the observation made in the HISHE review that Diana may not have actually heard Steve Trevor’s voice at all and all she did was believe she did. This would either make her really idealistic, or delusional… If emotional and psychological realism have been established in the film, would this mean that Diana’s experience in WWI has left her with some kind of PTSD? I think I would prefer this darker ending because how can you deal with death and destruction on such a scale and walk away untouched by it?

However, having said all of this, Wonder Woman is a fantastic film. Great cast, great pacing, fantastic music, wonderfully shot action sequences. Go catch it!

And can I just say that Chris Pine is a fine actor. People shouldn’t have been surprised. Anyone who’s seen him in Hell or High Water (2016) would know this.

Works Cited:

Williams, Linda. “Melodrama Revised.” Refiguring American Film Genres, 42-88.

Under the Skin (2013)

Finally watched Under the Skin (2013). It’s not my usual cup of tea I guess… not enough going on to keep me interested and definitely much slower paced than my usual fare. But that being said it was definitely made with a very consistent vision that came across very clearly in the atmosphere of the whole film.

Spoilers ahead.

The Air of Casual Tragedy

I thought a sense of casual tragedy really permeated the whole film. The long shots, wide shots, and long takes all serve to recreate a bustling city with everyone going every which way while Scarlett Johansson’s character makes her way down a busy street. The way she’s often almost lost in a shot populated with other people or made to appear insignificant amidst a sprawling landscape has a two-fold purpose.

Firstly, it emphasises her invisibility as a bona fide extra-terrestrial walking amongst Man. Secondly, it suggests how infinitesimal the likelihood of her victims ever being found – because they’re just one of the many, many human beings overpopulating the planet.

This air of casual tragedy is really brought across in two sequences in the film:

Firstly, in the beach sequence where she struggles to drag her victim’s body across the beach with nary an eye-witness safe for an 18-month old child left crying on the beach. From start to finish of this scene, the child is abandoned not once, but twice in two separate sequences by different characters, to suffer the elements unprotected. The family dog, mother, and father drowning in the crashing waves in the ocean is filmed in an impersonal wide shot, that presumably represents Johansson’s character’s point of view. Altogether, one gets a sense of distance and a muted awareness of the subjects of the shot who are slowly drowning and being kidnapped.

The second sequence is Johansson’s character’s death at the end of the film. The death of such a remarkable character on such a gruesome mission (to seduce men and steal their skins), is filmed in a wholly unremarkable manner. Once again, her collapse is filmed in a wide shot – depersonalised and from a distance. The lingering take of the black smoke rising up into the air and dissipating in the breeze to be replaced with falling snow becomes a slow and certain erasure of the character’s existence.

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Mirror-Stage

After establishing a pattern that clearly delineates Johansson’s character’s mission here on earth, the film takes an interesting (?) turn when she comes across a mirror after trapping one of her victims in the black goo that makes it possible to slough off one’s entire skin, whole and unblemished.

An obvious reference to Lacan’s mirror stage, the female alien is confronted by her reflection and a sudden knowledge of what she has been doing. It leads to a questioning of her identity. Is she alien? Can she be alien if she looks human? Is she human then? What does it mean to be human?

She begins to experiment and discover herself. From looking at her naked body in the mirror to explore her toes, her neck, to falling into a quasi-romantic relationship with a man who shows her a bit of kindness, she begins to discover herself and identify with her gendered body.

And that’s where things go downhill because to be woman is to be victim.

Of Womenhood and Victimhood

In a sharply funny sequence, Johansson’s character discovers the human anatomy of her nether regions. This involves the immediate cessation of an intimate interlude for her to grab a lamp off the table and shine it between her legs.

Her sudden acquaintance with her private parts seems to signal a completion of her journey of self-discovery. However, her identification with the parts between her legs only leads to a role-reversal where she is suddenly and brutally chased down in an attempted rape sequence.

The immediacy with which the attempted rape follows her understanding of her anatomy makes me think that the two are connected. The sudden shift in her role from predator to prey seems predicated upon her discovery and identification with womenhood. If read as such, then the film is saying, in no uncertain terms, that the moment she let her biology define her is the moment she lost all the other-worldliness that gave her strength and power and control over her situation because to identify as woman is to identify as victim.

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What have I been up to?

This is more of a personal update than anything else really and a way to put down random stray thoughts about the things I’ve read and watched in the last couple of months.

As I’ve said repeatedly, I’ve been watching an embarrassing amount of K-drama but there are comments about one in particular that keep knocking around my noggin and I can’t seem to let go of it.

Joseon Gunman (2014, 22 episodes)

Immediately, the thing that charmed me about this series is how much it’s like Rurouni Kenshin (1994-1999, manga run; 1996-1998, anime run; & 3 films 2012-2014). Set at the turn of an era, Joseon Gunman is about the influx of foreign influence into olden day Korea. What I liked about the series was the consistency with which this plot point/ thematic thrust about the changing times was infused into various elements of the series.

1. While it’s a totally common and overused trope in K-drama to have the character undergo a makeover when they become badass, that move in this drama seems totally justified. Forced to flee the country due to trumped up charges against his family, Park Yoon-Kang (Lee Joon-Gi) returns later, after leveling up, as a Japanese man dressed in Western clothes. The image itself of the main character returning and looking so different compresses all the geopolitical tensions of the time into the look of his character – Western colonial powers forcing East Asian countries to open their borders to unfair trade with them; aggression from fellow East Asian countries, etc.
2. The female lead, Jung Soo-In (Nam Sang-Mi), is a fairly respectable character. Learned for a female character, she often shown running rings around the main character in the first third of the series. She knows science, she knows geography, she deals with gunpowder. And later on in the series she becomes a spy within the palace grounds. I suppose I should’ve said spoilers… oh well.
3. The villain, Choi Won-Shin (Yu Oh-Seong), is a merchant. But the villain and his daughter, Choi Hye-Won (Jeon Hye-Bin), are fairly sympathetic characters. They struggle with their past as slaves and try and make a future for themselves by becoming astute, entrepreneurial, if a little corrupt, business people. They join the rising merchant class that in the histories of all countries at the time presented a real challenge and threat to the traditional class structures.
4. I’m not sure if this one was deliberate, but in the first half of the series at least, there was a lot of scenes set at harbours and piers. These settings represented the liminal spaces and the porous borders of countries through which ideologies, cultures, and other foreign elements enter and permeate the body politic.

What else have I watched lately?

I guess I haven’t had a chance to think about it more deeply but I watched A Boy and His Dog (1975). It’s vision of the post-nuclear apocalypse wasteland is a very effectively rendered one with psychic dogs, roving bands of human cannibals and unseen mutants called screamers that emit a green light. It’s also highly effective in affecting a disconcerting tone with its alternate visions of rape – the normalisation of it, and the industrialisation of it in the name of population control. It’s really a lot of food for thought. Very watchable with a lot to digest.

I also liked how there’s a very clear tonal link/echo in the successful game series Fallout (1997-2015). There’s this jaunty, lively, buddy-comedy type banter in the foreground between the boy and his dog but in the background and punctuating every scene are things like dead bodies (literally everywhere!), and the ruins of human civilisation. So that jarring quality between the dialogue and the setting is very similar to what we see in the Fallout game series. The creators of the series, if I’m not wrong, have actually credited the film as part of the game’s inspiration.

Here are some fun videos from the game to give you a sense of just how disconcerting and discomfiting both the film and game can be:

The last thing I watched and rather liked and just wanted to share with you guys here is Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017).

This year has truly been a year of sequels so far… er… with the exception of Alien: Covenant (2017) from what I hear… I haven’t caught it yet. But will soon.

In 2017, we’ve had John Wick 2, The Lego Batman Movie, Split and Logan. Not all of the above are technically sequels but they’ve all sprung from pre-existing franchises and so does this next installment of Guardians.

This film was super fun to watch. A lot of the more serious critics haven’t been really kind to it calling it a CGI-fest, which it is, but this film I felt was really enjoyable because it knew what NOT to dwell on.

Right from the start, the big monster fight was sidelined in in favour of watching baby Groot dance around to the soundtrack. And in the culminating fight at the end, the big fight was again repeatedly pushed to the side in favour of more character-centred moments like Rocket (Bradley Cooper) trying to get baby Groot familiarised with his detonator and people shouting in the background about tape.

Furthermore, while the centrepiece of the film was obviously an address of the question the previous film left us with – Peter Quill’s a.k.a. Starlord’s (Christ Pratt) parentage – the bulk of the narrative actually focused on the side characters and their understanding of parents and family. This narrative direction paralleled the film’s opening that moved away from the big, colourful boss fight to focus on the little guy – the supporting cast.

There was some pretty disturbing revelations about the relationship between Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Nebula (Karen Gillan), and Thanos. A huge chunk of the film also went towards developing Yondu (Michael Rooker), a side character in the first film, as a foster father figure to Quill. And there was also the introduction of a new orphan character, Mantis (Pom Klementieff) who finds a new family with the Guardian’s crew.

So what I’m trying to point out here is that family was a central theme and the film was able to really keep a focus on that instead of giving the audience yet another retina searing light show at the end in the form of a climactic boss fight.

That being said I can also sort of see where serious critics are coming from when they call the film as a CGI-fest. I thought the Ravagers story line was particularly weak.

Sylvester Stallone joined the cast this time round as Starhawk – some kind of ravager boss? (I’m not familiar with the comic book franchise but I hear from my fiance that he and his friends featured at the end were the Original Guardians of the Galaxy.) So the guy already has poor articulation, yet they gave him some of the most incomprehensible lines filled with a bunch of space mumbo-jumbo… I have to admit I was frowning pretty hard trying to figure out what he was saying, but then I gave up and spaced out. There was also some pretty heavy-handed cinematic manipulation going on in the ravagers funeral scene in an attempt to make the audiences feel something for a ritual that doesn’t actually exist outside of the film. That actually snapped me out of my suspension of disbelief… cuz they were just trying too hard.

But that being said, the best part of the film is the unending series of running jokes. People coming out of the film will repeat lines like, “You’re beautiful. On the inside.” and crack up! Much to the chagrin of an unsuspecting crowd that hasn’t seen the film. It’s really great fun and full of laughs. It’s not high art or anything but I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

I think that’s it for this post! See you guys soon!

The Lego Batman Movie (2017)

The ultimate movie of the year so far is, without a doubt,  The Lego Batman Movie.

In order to appreciate the magic of The Lego Batman Movie, one must first talk about The Lego Movie (2014). When The Lego Movie came out, everyone thought it was just a cash grab and no one expected how enjoyable and how intelligent the film would be.

(But it’s totally still a cash grab!)

The Lego Movie, took a good long look at user patterns and behaviours and wove that into a compelling narrative about conforming, following instructions versus being a rule-breaker and using the basic Lego piece as a building block for creating entirely new narratives and universes.

The other aspect of the film that gave fans an extra kick was the ease with which the film brought together characters from different narrative universes like characters from the Justice League and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and George Lucas’ Star Wars and many many more. For this to take place in a time when IP rights is a constant source of conflict between studios whether it’s about who owns the rights to the X-Men franchise or the Fantastic Four, or whether we’ll ever see any of these characters interact with other Marvel characters like Spiderman, and the Avengers, is the icing on the cake.

And on top of all this, you have that kickass song – Everything is Awesome! An earworm sure to possess your headspace after you hear it.

So when it came to The Lego Batman Movie, I was so sure they would not be able to top that. Boy, was I sorely mistaken. This movie is ALL the Batman you could ever want. From Adam West onward, the film lovingly pokes fun at all the incarnations of Batman including the 1990s Warner Brothers animated series and the godawful Joel Schumacher Batmans.

And all the Batman villains you could ever want too >_<

A huge part of the success of the film stems from the long history that Batman as an IP has had. Coming out of the theatre I had a really strong urge to tell people that there is no story. Instead the metanarrative of the Batman franchise has been brought down to the level of narrative.

I’m not sure if I’m overreaching with theory here but it almost feels like the Lego movies have become another layer of the carnivalesque. The Lego movies exist very much in the same strata as fanfiction and other fanworks where the narrative space of the movies (and the toy actually) become this alternate space to experiment with canon narratives very much like how all fictional spaces function as a carnivalesque spaces to experiment with the status quo of reality. The best part is that all of this is only possible with Lego. It’s almost as if the toy is a medium all of its own that’s different from that of CGI or stop-motion because of the business-end of how the IPs are distributed and understood between the toy company and the owners of the original superhero/fantasy IPs like Marvel/Disney/etc.

I love everything about this film. Everything about this film is amazing. From the Batman-Joker reverse love story, to the homoerotic undertones of Robin’s underpants. I couldn’t stop laughing from the moment Batman started talking, all the way to the end. And I very much want to watch this film in theatres again.

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Elle (2016)

My interest in Elle was sparked by a review I read previously by someone else that was written a while ago. It described Elle as a “rape-revenge comedy.” These are genres you just never expect to see together. The fact that the film was nominated for the Oscars and Golden Globes and a variety of other awards, suggests that somehow, Paul Verhoeven has managed to make this weird genre mesh-up work.

In preparation to write a review and some decent commentary on Elle I actually decided to do some prep work by reading up on the Rape-Revenge genre in Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws (Chapter 3: Getting Even). While it was a good read and really enlightening, I was disappointed to find that the critical view she espouses is a little dated. While Clover focused on Rape-Revenge film texts like Last House on the Left (1972), Deliverance (1972), I Spit on Your Grave (1977), etc., that made use of a city-country dynamic to underscore the onscreen conflicts, this was never the case in Elle.

Instead I found myself thinking that filmic representations of psychopaths as a way of reading Elle would be more relevant to the narrative Verhoeven was telling.

In a typical rape-revenge narrative, the film starts with the rape that is filmed in disconcerting detail with the camera’s gaze either lingering on the sexual violence or the act being edited into violent choppy cuts and then inserted into the narrative as sudden flashbacks that are as much an assault on the victim as it is on the audience because both are made to flinch and cringe every time they are ambushed with the rapist.

This is followed up by a planning or training period where the female character transforms herself from victim into avenging angel seeking vengeance for herself and/or for other female characters who’ve been similarly assaulted.

The narrative then culminates in a grisly conclusion where the bloodletting onscreen is orchestrated to reach the same bloody intensity as the psychic and physical violence of the rape.

Elle seems to have successfully flipped this narrative. There is no bloody conclusion, and very little preparation for vengeance. This is because there seems to be no victim. Or rather that the victim is so sociopathic that she doesn’t behave like one and doesn’t seem to see herself as a victim. And if she doesn’t think of herself as a victim, what right do we, the audience, have to think of her as one?

Instead, Verhoeven’s film seems to be very emphatically suggesting that despite all the syntactic elements of a rape-revenge narrative (including the rape, the purchase of the hatchet and the pepper spray, and the death-by-blugeoning of the rapist), Elle, semantically, is not about the same concerns. It is not about a woman rising up to avenge herself because she is not the disempowered individual in this narrative.

We see this in her day job where she is both an accomplished former publisher of literary works and current owner of a gaming company. We see this in her personal life where she is financially secure and the sole provider for her dependents (mother and son). And we see this in her deviant sexual preferences (for married men and willingness to enter into an S&M relationship with her rapist).

Furthermore, she doesn’t need to get her hands dirty to exact her revenge, by unmasking her rapist, stripping him of the anonymity that empowers him, naming him, and refusing to be the victim in violent sexual encounters, she unmans him almost literally by depriving him of his turn-on and his erection.

Thus, despite the backlash against this film based on claims that it trivialises or dismisses rape with its comedic undertones, the film can be read as a more progressive rape-revenge narrative instead.

This is based on two reasons firstly rape has been said to be more a crime of power rather than a sexual crime, and secondly, the rape-revenge narrative itself suffers from an undercurrent of victim-blaming that often slides under the radar given all the attention focused on the empowered female character who saves herself.

For revenge fantasies to work, there must be something worth avenging – something egregious enough to justify hideous retaliation. In the case of rape-revenge films, that something has to do not only with the rape, but with the power dynamic between men and women that makes rape happen in the first place, and in the second, that makes it so eminently avengeable.

-Carol J. Clover taken from “Getting Even” from Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p144

In other words, the source of pleasure in the genre comes in part from the fact that the victim has been doubly raped. Firstly, by the fact that she is a victim everyday in various small ways as part of a society that privileges the patriarch and secondly, by the rape in the film. However, as Verhoeven so clearly sets up in Elle, Michele Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) is never in a position of lower power except in the moment of the rape.

The other way in which Elle is a progressive rape-revenge narrative, is that embedded in the genre is an element of victim-blaming:

[It] must surely be the case that there is some ethical relief in the idea that if women would just toughen up and take karate or buy a gun, the issue of male-on-female violence would evaporate. It is a way of shifting responsibility from the perpetrator to the victim: if a woman fails to get tough, fails to buy a guy or take karate, she is, in an updated sense of the cliche, asking for it.

Carol J. Clover taken from “Getting Even” from Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p143

Thus in the case of Elle, the rape is an assault and an act of violence, yes, but it is an act between individuals of equal standing in society. Furthermore, the rape acts as a moment that pierces the veil that Michele has drawn over herself to mask her sociopathy.

In the narrative following the incident, we see her destroy her ex-husband’s car bumper with her car by backing into it repeatedly; leave a toothpick in her ex-husband’s new squeeze’s appetizer; come on to her neighbour who is a married man; deliberately destroy her best friend’s marriage by telling her that she has been sleeping with her husband just as they look like they’re getting back together; and various other small incidents like that. Thus the rape causes a rupture in the symbolic realm of Michele’s existence, forcing her to confront her past with her father who murdered 27 people, and get to grips with the reality of her character.

(Although… my fiance pointed out that all these little behaviours could be status quo for her and have nothing to do with the rape at all. I maintain that given the medium and where the narrative chose to start and where it ends, the rape is meant to give an additional layer of meaning to all her following behaviours.)

Thus, at the end of the day, despite all the trappings of the rape-revenge genre, this is not a rape revenge film. It’s more about two sociopaths going at one another.

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Hell or High Water (2016)

Hell or High Water. Actually, my appreciation of Elle and Hell or High Water is roughly the same. The reason why I’m looking at Hell or High Water first is simply a matter of personal taste. The Wild West/Western aesthetic of Hell or High Water just appeals to me less compared to the Rape-Revenge generic conventions used in Elle. Both films are Oscar nominated films and both deliciously dense and multi-layered. But in my opinion, they’re also not films you’d watch just for fun, which is why I’m saving The Lego Batman Movie for last 😉

Hell or High Water is a David Mackenzie film about two brothers, Tanner (Ben Foster) and Toby Howard (Chris Pine), who commit a series of bank robberies in order to get back at Texas Midlands Bank which is threatening to foreclose on their family farm.

The lasting impression I had of the film is that it is a cross-generational film about the evolving hierarchy of peoples and characters in a Western. I say this because on one hand it is a heist film, but on the other hand, it also has all the trappings of a Western, all the syntactic elements of the genre, if you will.

For instance, the element of the wild is represented by the bank-robbing outlaw brothers. Civilisation is represented by the law in the form of Jeff Bridges’ lawman, Marcus Hamilton, a racial epithet spouting senior on the cusp of retirement who spends most of his dialogue verbally abusing his partner, Alberto Parker (Gil Bermingham), a Catholic of Comanche descent. This cop duo unabashedly represent the old guard of Western films. The way Hamilton continuously harangues Parker despite his respect and camaraderie with him speaks to the complicated relationship between the cowboy and the red indian in old Westerns.

Speaking of cowboys, the film also makes it a point to dot the landscape with real cowboys trying to drive cattle and being chased to the edge of the plain by a brush fire. The hard work and the tough living of the lifestyle is captured in Hamilton’s line about how it’s no wonder being a cowboy is a dying trade amongst the younger generation.

Finally, apart from the sweeping shots of a sprawling landscape that somehow manages to look more barren that rich with opportunity for one to venture further west to reinvent oneself, the film also ends with a gun fight. However, this gunfight is not a one-on-one draw. This gunfight uses high-powered rifles with scopes and semi-automatic weapons.

Watching this film, the line that stood out the most to me was when Tanner Howard gets into a confrontation with a Comanche at a poker table:

Bear: I am a Comanche. Do you know what it means? It means ‘Enemy to everyone’.

Tanner Howard: Do you know what that makes me? A Comanche.

This reminded me of something else I’d read recently about how the “redneck” has been rewritten as the “redskin”:

[It] is not just the demonizing mechanism that the city-revenge films have inherited from the western. It is the redskin himself – now rewritten as the redneck. If “redneck” once denoted a real and particular group, it has achieved the status of a kind of universal blame figure, the “someone else” held responsible for all manner of American social ills. The great success of the redneck in that capacity suggests that anxieties no longer expressible in ethnic of racial terms have become projected onto a safe target – safe not only because it is (nominally) white, but because it is infinitely displaceable onto someone from the deeper South or the higher mountains or the further desert (one man’s redneck is another man’s neighbour, and so on).

– Carol J. Clover taken from “Getting Even” from Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film

Except that this narrative has changed. In Trump’s American, the blame can no longer be endlessly displaced onto some generic group of people on the fringes of society. The disenfranchised low-income whites in America have been pushed so far out into the margins that they have had nowhere else to go but start an inward trek into the centre of politics by any means necessary, even if it means backing a megalomaniac that’s more likely to dismantle the system than save them because what’s the point of supporting a system that has ousted them to the furthest reaches of society?

And in Hell or High Water, we see how this group of people are humanised and made sympathetic through the Howard brothers. So instead of simply being the wild, and the disruptive element in a civilised landscape, they are the characters you root for. We see this time and time again in how the locals simply can’t be bothered to help the authorities. What more, the law/legal authorities have become ciphers – displaced and men out of time – henchmen of the banks and a corrupt financial system that continues to rob and bankrupt a people.

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Blitz Reviews (& Spoilers): A Cure for Wellness (2017); Split (2017)

I’ve watched a number of films in the last couple of weeks and I’d like to use this blogpost to say a few things about them.

Firstly, these are the films I’ve watched:

1. A Cure for Wellness (2017)
2. The Lego Batman Movie (2017)
3. Split (2017)
4. Elle (2016)
5. Hell or High Water (2016)

So in the tradition of keeping the best for last, let’s start with A Cure for Wellness. Till now I have yet to puzzle out what the main message of the film is in part because it was trying to do so many things that I left the theatre with just a series of questions:

What does the secret lake under the sanitorium and the incestuous backstory of the Baron have to do with the first half of the film about the corporate rat race? Why did the film have such a compelling marriage of word and image in the line about humans being the only species capable of self-reflection when the second half of the film is more mystery than self-reflection? How is the Cure for Wellness actually made? Does one have to ingest the 300-year old magical eels? Is this necessary if there is already something small and moving and alive in the water already? How is it converted into the mysterious orangey-brown liquid? Why do the patients at the sanitorium not know that they’re being used as a purification system to create said cure? Why is Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) the only one who realises that there’s something odd with the place if everyone receives the same treatment? Is there hypnosis involved (I’m guessing… there was no mention of hypnosis)? Why did leaving the sanitorium to grab a beer with Lockhart help Hannah (Mia Goth) enter into womanhood? Is the magic locale bound? Is physical innocence also a mental state?

And finally, and most importantly, in a film that showed us  worms, then eels, why did we not graduate to snakes or giant snake monsters by the end of the film? I found this to be the most disappointing thing about the film. No. Giant. Snake. Monsters.

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Next, Split. With Split, it’s not so much that it’s not a good movie, rather it’s more about how the film has been grossly overhyped. Split is a nice, neat little film with a clear premise. The believability about the premise regarding Split Personality Disorder gives the film just the right amount of creep factor that when the film carries this premise to its logical conclusion, the film ends in a satisfactorily manner.

James McAvoy’s performance in this little thriller is impressive too. Although my one gripe is that I wished there was more of an explanation of why Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley) failed to see that Kevin Wendall Crumb, who already has 23 personalities, couldn’t have a 24th.

The easter egg at the end that puts Split in the same cinematic universe as Unbreakable (2000) was a nice touch for fans familiar with M. Night Shyamalan’s oeuvre, but at the end of the day, also a little superfluous.

OMG. Such fantastic fanart O_O

 

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

What is it with sequel titles this year? John Wick: Chapter 2, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2… it’s like there are just too many sequels to name. That being said 2017 seems to be the year of good sequels. Split (2017) which is positioned in the same universe as M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000) got great reviews, The Lego Batman Movie which is a follow up to 2014’s surprise success The Lego Movie seems to be getting rave reviews, and of course, there’s John Wick: Chapter 2.

When analysing a film, one of the things I try to look out for is the scene that is included in excess of what is absolutely necessary for narrative development and progress. And the opening shot of the John Wick sequel provided just such a filmic moment. A black and white clip of a scooter stunt projected on the side of a building apropos of nothing preceding a pan downwards to a motorcycle skidding on a road. The two sequences obviously mirrored each other and spelled out the film’s thesis and lineage in one fell swoop.

The black and white clip recalls the era of early films from the 1900s before even Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, where vaudeville danger acts were the source of most of the silver screen’s inspiration. What John Wick: Chapter 2 tries to remind the viewer then is that these spectacle-intensive single reel films are the precursor to the modern day action film. The fact that the film opens with a car chase scene further supports this claim because, you know that saying, “cut to the chase”? That came from roughly the same film era. People just wanted to cut to the chase, the meat of the film, the part where all the action was – the most intense scene, and the most exciting one that would keep the audiences hooked and on the edge of their seats.

Thus, the sequel serves to remind us that when watching a John Wick film, one is well and truly a spectator spectating a series of spectacles. The structure of both films are fairly similar and could almost be called episodic with simple motivations moving characters from one action-packed sequence to the next. This is not unlike how George Melies used to make his trick films and early feature length films:

As for the scenario, the ‘fable,’ of the ‘tale,’ I only consider it at the end. I can state that the scenario constructed in this manner has no importance, since I use it merely as a pretext for the ‘stage effects,’ the ‘tricks,’ for a nicely arranged tableau.

– George Melies qtd. in Tom Gunning’s “Cinema of Attraction”

When seen in this light, it would explain a little bit why the momentum of the opening act in the John Wick sequel seemed to stutter a little when they tried to insert a recap of the first film.

That being said, the opening act was surely a homage to the action film genre and the franchise’s first installment that was the sleeper hit of 2014 that has since been hailed as one of the best action films in recent years. This is clearly felt from the range of shots and filming techniques presented in the opening sequence to remind the viewer of how far film has progressed in its strategies and effects used to capture and present spectacle.

In the early days of film, stunts and performers’ skill could only be captured through the use of long shots and long takes. But proceeding from the long shot in the black and white projection, we see that the camera is moved closer and closer to the action where audiences are no longer positioned on the outside as spectators but on the inside as participants.For instance, the placement of the camera alongside John Wick’s Dodge Charger as it races along as part of the car chase sequence allows audiences to participate in the thrill and the exhilaration of moving  alongside a speeding car.

The long shots and long takes are still present, but are reserved for complicated auto stunts and when John Wick (Keanu Reeves) kicks ass. The mobile camera is used to accentuate action sequences and follow along the trajectory of a punch, like when Wick delivers a finishing blow, to capture the impact of the hit. And if I’m not wrong, there was a scene where a bike flips towards the camera that looked like it was a CGI shot.

And just like that, the opening sequence becomes a catalogue of action film camera techniques. But because of the ascension of the narrative film and the banishment of the cinema of attractions that was forced to go to ground and coexist as an embedded component of certain genres of the narrative film (eg. musical, horror, fantasy, science fiction, action), the opening spectacle also had to give way to more narrative impulses. In a neat segue from spectacle to narrative, character psychology is reinjected once again into the film using the car and the contents of its glove compartment.

Thus Wick’s Dodge Charger becomes both the vehicle for action and narrative drive. And by the end of the opening act, you feel like you’ve been issued an invitation to come along for one hell of a ride.

Gunning, Tom. “Cinema of Attractions.” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker. London: British Film Institute, 1990. 56-62.

Film Musicals: La La Land Vs…

La La Land (2016) has scored for itself six Golden Globes and has been nominated for a bunch of Oscars which it looks on track to winning too.

The thing is no matter how beautiful this film looks, or how passably melodic the songs are, it still looks like a film that has only gotten so far because of Hollywood’s undying penchant for sucking its own dick.

To be sure, La La Land is a beautifully shot film. Like visually – stunning. Just beautiful. The use of primary colours popped and the panoramic shots of LA were breathtakingly beautiful. The use of primary colours as a motif for fantasy and the blending of the colours into more drab and realist tones also a subtle touch to show the collision between fantasy and reality.

BUT even the well-publicised news of Ryan Gosling spending 3 months learning how to play the piano so he could do the piano bits himself, is not enough to distract from the mediocre singing from the two leads that often left me cringing in my seat waiting for the songs to be over.

The fact of the matter is that there are so many other films that have focused on similar themes and done so in a more streamlined, more succinct manner.

The two main lines of tension in La La Land is firstly, the struggle to straddle the line between being true to yourself and your artistic vision versus selling out in order to become famous and make a living from commercializing your art; and secondly, how the romancing of one’s art can get in the way of the romance between two people.

With regards to these two lines of narrative tension being perfectly intertwined and balanced in a single narrative that works, we can look back 40 years to Martin Scorsese’s New York New York (1977). There you had a real powerhouse, Liza Minnelli, to belt out the title song.

You also had the dramatic use of music/art as the very thing that drives a wedge between the couple (Liza Minnelli as Francine Evans & Robert De Niro as Jimmy Doyle), such that you really felt the tragedy of the ending where even after both parties have made it (Jimmy with his night club & Francine with her successful singing career), the healthiest thing they both could do for the sake of their own sanity was to stay far away from each other.

(4.38 onward)

Granted that at 2hrs 43mins, the film can feel a little overlong but it tracks their relationship from attraction to marriage, pregnancy and divorce, blending in the developments of their respective musical careers at every step of the way.

Another film that uses the romance between a man and a woman to talk about musicians and the music industry is the 2014 film, Begin Again, starring Adam Levine and Kiera Knightly. In Begin Again, a musician couple – where one half represented the indie music scene and the other, whatever it took to become a commercial success – function as a stand-in for a story that is about more than just a girl in love with a boy.

It is another narrative that ends in the eventual dissolution of the romance between the two lovers. Personally, I felt these two films were more succinct than La La Land because as I was watching La La Land, I kept asking myself why an actress and a jazz musician? What’s the connection there? Worse still, what’s the conflict there? The conflict always seemed more personal, in a way that was completely unrelated to their art, than professional or career-driven because when they finally meet with success in the end, there was nothing concrete that prevented them from being together other than the fact that they gave up too early on each other instead of sticking it out to the very end.

The thing about New York New York and Begin Again is that the male and female leads are both musicians and there’s a real conflict of professional ideals mixed in with the romantic hardships each couple faces that eventually prevents them from getting back together. Francine Evans and Jimmy Doyle would have destroyed each other if they got back together and Greta (Kiera Knightly) and Dave (Adam Levine) couldn’t because they were each pulling for aspects of the music industry which, according to the way the film set it up, were in direct conflict with each other.

With Begin Again, I also liked how it introduced another element, a music producer (Mark Ruffalo), and spent a huge amount of the plot on the difficulties of producing an indie album that eventually had to welcome and embrace the ambient sounds of the streets since Greta’s makeshift band couldn’t afford to book a studio to record in. Fortunately, that resulted in an inspired piece of work.

Arguably, Begin Again ends with some ambiguity, unlike New York New York and La La Land, with two radio friendly versions of the same song, “Lost Stars”. It leaves it up to the audience to decide which version they prefer and consequently, who they side with, and which side of the tension between indie and commercial music they fall on.

Speaking of the sounds of the street, another film that came out in 2016 that has achieved both critical and popular success and was nominated for the best comedy/musical category at this year’s Golden Globes too, is Sing Street.

Undeniably based on the romanticised version of how the Beatles came to be, Sing Street is about a group of school boys from Dublin forming a band. Although a homage to great bands through the ages like The Cure, Duran Duran, The Jam, Motorhead, etc., this film also had a split focus between visuals and music but managed to marry the two quite effectively by inserting a young model, Raphina (Lucy Boynton), as the female star in the band’s self-made music videos, and having the band lead’s (Cosmo played by Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) clothes and hair style change comically based on whichever strain of music was influencing his songwriting at that point in time.

The shy awkward tones of male voices breaking in the midst of puberty blend together in a heartfelt narrative of small town artists wanting to break away and make it in the big city. Both La La Land and Sing Street feature the film musical trope of having the music overtake the visuals at the height of the film’s narrative and emotional tension to weave an internally focalised illusion of what the musician sees.

In La La Land this is in the much talked about climax at the end of the film where Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) plays the theme song on the piano one last time in his club as he and Mia (Emma Stone) share a fantasy of what their lives could have been. Easily the best moment in the film but also an overly melodramatic and highly manipulative one aimed at bringing audiences to tears.

In Sing Street, this comes before the final sequence in the film about two thirds?three quarters? of the way through the film when the band books the school hall to make another music video and Raphina doesn’t show up. We’re left with Cosmo’s version of how he imagines the music video to look before he and the audience crash back to reality at the end of the number.

What I liked better in Sing Street is that the film musical’s predictable use of this syntactic element of the genre was not left to the end as a climactic scene. Instead, the film ends on a much more subtle note. The young lovers, Cosmo and Raphina, leave on a tiny motorboat with the intention of sailing to England from Dublin to find their fortune in London.

It’s meant to be an uplifting scene with the smiles on everyone’s faces and the rousing soundtrack in the background but this is where soundtrack and visuals clash in a highly satisfying manner. They leave in the midst of a blinding rainstorm, nearly collide with a cruise ship, bring nothing with them except the clothes on their backs, their demo tapes and portfolio of head shots. In the background, Cosmo’s parents are getting divorced, the family is going to lose their house and the kids will have to shuffle between mum and dad. Without any indication of whether they succeed in their journey or drown at sea, the film ends with a decent amount of hope pinned on their endeavour amidst the crashing waves of reality that results in a lovely feeling of ambiguity as you leave the theatre.

I suppose by this point everyone if feeling like, “What the hell? Why are all these musicals so ambiguously depressing?!”Well, if you want a light-hearted romantic comedy with a happy ending, there’s always Music and Lyrics (2007). Again it features the tension between staying true to one’s artistic vision and compromising for the sake of commercial appeal. Except, this time the slant on the music industry is the tension between performer and the lyricists. Anyway, this one ends happily with Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant) and Sophie Fisher (Drew Barrymore) getting together just as how his melody and her lyrics are eventually performed the way they are meant to be performed.

That’s it. That’s all I have to say about La La Land and how while it looks great, narratively speaking it didn’t quite hit the spot for me.