La La Land - History of the Modern Musical

On December 9th La La Land, the new film from Damien Chazelle, will be released in certain cinemas in USA. On Christmas Day it will be a wide-spread release and on January 13th the UK will get it. After the critical and Oscar darling, Whiplash, Chazelle's first movie was released buzz was outu for his next big movie. A dream project of his was an old Hollywood style big musical in present day.

This film was a smash hit, the critics loved it, the audience loved it, musical theatre fans loved it, musical haters loved it. The expert artistry of Damien Chazelle's work as a director made it an instant success. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, Hollywood's new Burton and Taylor, were on the big screen, dancing tap and bursting into song. And for a genre as maligned and shunned in modern Hollywood as the musical genre, that's no small feat.

Musicals in more recent years have run the gambit from box office poison (Into the Woods) or critical and award-winning extravaganzas (Les Miserables, Moulin Rouge) but since 2001, post 9/11 Hollywood has found itself unable to recapture musicals glory heydays, think MGM's days, the old days of Singin In The Rain, The Wizard of Oz, Top Hat, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, the list goes on. Musicals post Moulin Rouge mainly existed in Disney films and animation and rarely made it to the big screen the way they used to. But they have tried and it has rarely turned out well to make a big cheesy, dancing-the-night-away style of film reach audiences the way they used to. The same way action films have changed, so too have musicals. Audiences cannot accept the fantasy and the escapism unless they root it in something more realistic. Gone are the boom-and-bombastic disaster films and gone are top hats and tap shoes on the big screen.

 

And somehow they did it. Damien Chazelle shopped the project around Hollywood executives and, as expected, received a very hearty "no" from most. That is until Lionsgate, who was an unlikely

The film was huge, gaining fourteen Oscar nominations from the Academy Awards, tied for the most nominations since All About Eve and Titanic, and eleven from the Foreign Press Association at the Golden Globes. The film was well on the way to win the Best Picture as well, although for all who watched the Oscars this turned out to not be the case. Still, nevertheless, the film is iconic, gathering what it wants