I've seen "Singin' in the Rain" before, several times, but always on home video and usually with my parents. It really is a fun movie with some gorgeous song-and-dance numbers. I kept getting choked up. First, because Debbie Reynolds looks so young and fresh in it, and I couldn't help recalling that she passed away around the same time as her daughter, Carrie Fisher. And I gather that heartbreak had something to do with it. Then there's the song "Good Morning," which my dad and stepmom used to sing (now and then) to get me out of bed when I was a kid. And Gene Kelly's famous splashing-through-puddles performance of the title song. And various other things that hit me in the feels for nostalgic reasons. I shed a few tears.
I also got a kick out of laying on my fellow audience members, as they got up to leave, the obscure factoid that the plot of the movie – in which a glamorous silent-film actress at the height of her career suddenly has to make a talkie and, due to her grating, nasal voice, ends up having another actress off-camera speak her lines into a microphone while she lip syncs. That, fyi, is what happened when Alfred Hitchcock made "Blackmail," initially a silent movie that turned on a dime and became Britain's first talkie, despite starlet Annie Ondra having a thick Polish accent. Without the romantic hijinks or off-camera backstabbing depicted in "Singin'," the solution was generally what the later musical comedy depicts, with one actress at the end of her career mouthing the words and another actress easing into stardom from off-camera.
As for "La La Land," a musical love story featuring a struggling actress and a frustrated jazz pianist in recent-day Hollywood, I had no previous emotional investment in the film because, you know, it was my first time seeing it. I mostly knew about it, before this past weekend, due to its involvement in a Best Picture envelope snafu at the Academy Awards. It might have deserved to be a Best Picture winner. It was a gorgeously made movie and it also got me in the feels.
But it certainly didn't have the overall joyful vibe that "Singin' in the Rain" exudes. There's a lot of disappointment, discouragement, and down-and-outness in it. The romantic couple's first three encounters are not what you'd normally call the makings of a great love story (though there does seem to be a certain unacknowledged spark between them in the song-and-dance piece "A Lovely Night" (as in "What a waste of a lovely night").
The movie has more wonderful songs in it, like "The Fools Who Dream" and "City of Stars," and of course one mustn't forget the opening ensemble number "Another Day of Sun." The music is mainly by Justin Hurwitz with one written and sung by John Legend. One clever thing about the movie is how a story that feels heart-honest is sold through a series of songs that all serve the purpose, unlike some of the numbers in "Singin'," which seem to have been shoehorned in without regard for relevance to the storyline. Another clever thing is how Ryan Gosling actually looks like he's playing great jazz on the piano. Can he really do that?
Then there were some impressive dream sequences, like dancing in the stars at the planetarium and the girl's vision of what her life with the boy might have been if they had stayed together, etc. The visual and musical whimsies fill the eyes and the heart. Damien Chazelle (director) and Emma Stone (lead actress) earned their Oscars for sure, and though the movie was rather cruelly denied the top prize after all, it's still a great achievement and a hopeful sign that the movie musical ain't dead yet.
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