In 2016, Hollywood had one of the most beloved movies with a 94% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an IMDB score of 8.9. The Film's English name is la la land, and the Chinese translates particularly well, called "Philharmonic City".
Poster of Philharmonic City
What kind of god film is this?
When it comes to the three words of "song and dance film", the post-70s and post-80s may think of "The Legend of the New White Lady" and "If Love", and the actors sing as they speak. It is a form of cinema that relies mainly on song and dance to portray characters and plots.
In 1927, the first sound film "Jazz Song King" came out, which was a song and dance film, and then the more famous song and dance films such as "Song in the Rain" and so on. In the nearly 90-year history of the Oscars, 10 song and dance films have won the Best Picture Award, including "The Sound of Music", "Cabaret King Siegfried", "Walk with Me", "West End Story", and "Chicago", which we are more familiar with Chinese.
Although the 2011 black-and-white silent film "The Great Artist" won the best film, it is not a song and dance film. And the very real song and dance drama "Moulin Rouge", did not get the best movie that year. China's old movies "Road Angel", "White Haired Girl" and "Liu Sanjie" are all song and dance films.
Catherine Zeta Jones in Chicago.
The story of "City of Philharmonic" presents a core conflict in life: dream pk love. In the journey of hard work, do we choose to sacrifice our own love, or abandon everything to pursue our dreams? The film concludes with a third hypothesis: Can we take care of both?
The whole film is basically composed of two protagonists. The heroine, Mia (Emma Stone), a working girl at warner Pictures Cafe, wants to become an actress after dropping out of college, auditioning everywhere, but hitting a wall; the male protagonist, Sabastian (Ryan Gosling), fails to start a business in jazz, is penniless, lives in a humble apartment, plays the piano for a restaurant, but he does not give up his dream of jazz and wants to open his own jazz bar.
The two ordinary characters have different artistic pursuits, and their dreams reflect their distinct personalities.
Mia is in her early 20s, backed by a warm family, she believes that people should fight for their ideals once in a lifetime, and has a fearless and even one-sided personality.
Sabastian, who had passed the age of establishment, was a romantic who had no plan for life. He's like jazz, casual, passionate but complicated. When he met Mia and the two became romantic, he lost himself, began to surrender to reality, and stopped pursuing traditional jazz.
"Philharmonic City" is also a high-value idol film.
I must admit that I am not a fan of song and dance films, and every time I hear the actor sing inexplicably, I get goosebumps all over the ground. Therefore, when I learned that "Philharmonic City" was a song and dance film, I was not very interested in it.
The first time I saw this film was at the end of August this year, at the Ipic Theater in Los Angeles, because it was an afternoon show, I also specially found a seat in the last row, thinking that if it did not look good, I would sneak away. As a result, by the end of the film, I was in tears, and a film critic and journalist in his 80s was in tears.
"City of Philharmonic" won the Best Actress award at the 2016 Venice International Film Festival and the Audience Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival; the film led the film category with seven nominations at the 74th Golden Globe Awards; and the actor and actress were nominated for the 23rd Screen Actors Guild Awards.
"'City of Philharmonic' is a love letter to Los Angeles"
I often refer to Los Angeles as a "pheasant village" because the city feels like a rural village with a highway.
At the film's U.S. premiere, the mayor of Los Angeles said that "'City of Philharmonic' shows the most romantic side of the whole city, more beautiful than Shanghai and Paris." Although this is a bit of a princess selling melons, "Philharmonic City" does beautify the pheasant village fiercely. One of the big reasons Hollywood loves this movie so much is that it takes over the atmosphere of Los Angeles.
The classic Los Angeles attraction in the film.
The film begins with a scene of song and dance on the highway. Thousands of cars are blocked on the Los Angeles highway, creating a huge parking lot that characterizes the village of Pheasant. Due to Los Angeles' big urban planning, there is no sound public transportation equipment here, almost every household has a car, and the only two days that are not congested are Christmas Day and New Year's.
People on the way got out of the car and started singing and dancing, and rolled and jumped on the roof. This kind of unrealistic artistic expression that reflects the reality of the situation sets a romantic tone for the whole film. The hero and heroine also meet here.
The movie opens
Then, Mia's audition scene was hilarious, and it also made "Stone Sister" Emma Stone the most likely winner to win the Oscar. Of course, it is not because of how superior her acting skills are, but because she has played a sad experience of countless actors who want to get ahead in Hollywood. More than half of the Oscar judges are actors, and Sister Stone directly pulled a lot of votes.
Mia's audition encounter is actually her real experience with the "High Commander". The two people who began to audition since childhood saved a basket of bizarre audition stories, of which the more outrageous thing was that the audition director took a phone call when the high commander was acting in the script and directly let the high commander go home; and The stone sister said that she had been interrupted by the lunch box before, and she was aggrieved to tears.
Mia, who was spilled a cup of coffee and did not get the role.
There are also some small details in the film that are very funny and make Los Angeles people laugh. When Mia attends a Hollywood mansion, a short man who claims to be a screenwriter stalks her. This is a common thing in Hollywood, and men who say that they are screenwriters often use dog-blooded lines like "You are the best actress in my mind" to make a fool of themselves. Actresses with great vanity but touching intelligence can also be "deceived".
Even the film emperor Matthew McDonald has said, "In Hollywood, the most successful people are often the ones who don't let go of any debut opportunities, and those who turn away opportunities generally don't get what they want." And when Mia wanted to get a car to escape the party, she found that countless people were driving the same car as herself: the Toyota Prius.
This is another Hollywood feature, because there are many people who pay attention to environmental protection and are not willing to pay expensive oil, even Xiao Li can open a Prius.
"The love of unprofessional artists is very unreliable"
"Philharmonic City" is full of romantic bridges in which director Damien pays homage to Federico Fellini's "Dancing Nation" and Jean Kelly's "Song in the Rain". A dance of stars by Mia and Sabastian at griffith Observatory is also a climactic point in the first half of the film. This waltz is very simple, reflecting the sublimation of the relationship between the two, enough to melt the hearts of all angry youth.
"Philharmonic City" is divided into four seasons, the two meet in winter, love in spring, love in summer, break up in autumn, and reunite again in the winter after 5 years. Interestingly, Los Angeles is a city with a particularly inconspicuous quarter. But "City of Philharmonic" represents the protagonist's mood change with each season, creating emotional seasons on the big screen. This is director Damien's cleverness in screenwriting.
The snow scene of the party sets off the loneliness of an unprofessional actress.
The love affair of the hero and heroine is like a song and dance in the movie, burning in an instant, but it is ruthlessly blown away by reality. The two soon moved in together and were crammed into a small apartment. Mia gave up her job at a coffee shop and decided to concentrate on script writing. Sabastian took on the financial burden and joined a pop jazz band as a keyboard player against his will. The two went farther and farther apart on the career fork, which eventually led to the rupture of the relationship.
Is this passage familiar? How many Hollywood showbiz couples can stick together when they are working hard, even if they are married, how many couples can maintain a happy marriage after one party becomes famous?
Robert de Niro once said, "Los Angeles has three homes for movie actors: the home of the ex-wife, the home of the current wife, and the third home of Hollywood." ”
When Sabastian and Mia separated, they said, "I will always love you," felt that this love would always be less than the artist's love for his own fame. The director, who was also married and divorced during the struggle period, also has his own views on this "tradition" of Hollywood artists choosing careers, and he gives us an answer at the end of the film:
"Experiencing the original life in song and dance is perhaps the most important entertainment role of the film in the chaotic world."
City of Philharmonic is director Damien Chazere's second film, written and directed by himself. His debut film "Burst Drummer" is also about jazz, which won Oscar nominations for best director, best picture and other nominations that year, and also helped the millennium J.K. Simmons win back a small golden man.
Damien is only 31 years old, and the Harvard graduate wrote "Philharmonic City" 6 years ago, but he is not yet famous in the industry and cannot find investment. The success of "Burst Drummer" opened the door to Damien's director "Philharmonic City" and completed the production at a cost of thirty million DOLLARs.
The High Commander's kiss on the screen after "Love Notepad".
"Philharmonic City" is like "My Grand Greek Wedding" released after "9/11", born in a chaotic world, becoming a way for everyone to escape from reality. Unlike other Oscar hits, this is a highly original light comedy song and dance film. The story is simple, the characters are eye-catching, the dance pictures are beautiful, and the songs are catchy, which not only reflects the traditional advantages of song and dance films, but also makes film critics who have watched countless drama films shine.
Film is an entertainment medium that makes everyone forget reality. "Philharmonic City" most directly played the entertainment role of the film after the chaotic US election.
I've seen some Chinese media say that "the lineup of best picture does not look particularly obvious, and it is much more uneven this year than last year's Oscar-like works such as "The Revenant", "Focus" and "Bridge of Spies".
I disagree with that statement.
American filmmakers have returned to the track of using film art to talk about ordinary life after Obama's 8 years of humane administration and 2 years of scandals in the presidential election. "Manchester by the Sea" and "Moonlight Boy", which have the best chance of winning the best picture in next year's Olympic films, both tell touching stories of ordinary American families, rather than using scenes and superstars to create so-called film effects. Even "Loving", which is based on real people and real events, uses small coffee actors, which is a beautiful and literary reproduction of a cross-racial relationship of historical significance.
Judging from the current Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, Damien and Stone Sister have a better chance of winning Best Director and Best Actress respectively. "Philharmonic City" has a smaller chance of winning the Oscar for Best Picture, because this film does not have many casts, all rely on male and female lead actors in the field, and did not get a nomination for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Group Performance, which is the most decisive weather vane for the Oscar for Best Picture.
The male and female protagonists jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt of the 1997 film "Getting Better" became the screen actors guild award and oscar double film queen, but the film did not win the Screen Actors Guild Award for best group performance, and also missed the Oscar for best picture. Others in this situation are Gravity and The Dallas Buyers Club.
However, winning the prize is only an incentive mechanism. "City of Philharmonic" has been talked about by Hollywood and audiences, as the second work of young director Damien, is this not enough?
I work in the film and television media in the United States and am a member of the Hollywood Foreign Journalists Association (commonly known as the "Golden Globe Awards Organizing Committee"). Simply put, my daily work can be summarized as watching movies! interview! Watch the film again! I'm an indie film fan who loves Herzog, Wenders and Ang Lee, as well as a die-hard fan of Sex and the City and Light of Victory. You can go to my surging question http://www.thepaper.cn/asktopic_detail_10006937 leave a message to ask questions, and also welcome to visit my Sina Weibo "Ting can't come down to watch the film room".