The series is about sex, love, family, and vocation---in no particular order. Season 1 is structured as a perfect textbook. There is a context for each episode, so that it can be watched separately, at least in principle. But there is also a theme, a plot line, that runs through. Season 2, confident in its ability to keep the attention of the audience, is a single, extended story.
The show does not require its protagonists do stupid things to get themselves into interesting situations. Instead, the plot presents the characters with situations in which morally correct behaviour is not apparent and consumer-grade morality is inapplicable. All characters are intelligent, mature.
The show correctly captures the signature of a foreigner: someone who has had an opportunity to question and redefine the social norms and graces, someone who has reduced Americanness to its essence.
By contrast to movies, the series has no worldwide distribution. Hence, there is no pressure to win foreign markets with technological gimmicks and short snappy conversations. There is no misconception that the story must be brought down to the lowest common denominator to appeal broadly.
Episode "Only You" captures something ineffable in Gregory's desire to die in the streets of an American city. The romanticism of a ten-minute walk through the---for the occasion---San-Francisco-exuding streets of D.C. is worth a lifetime in Moscow, for him.
26 January 2017
23 January 2017
"La La Land" (2016)
"We are all visitors here," said Hugo H.
"Everything passes," said Maricela N.
"Now, you can't live your life like that..." said Woody A.
All passionate to be and to create and, in that, all citizens of the world that has grown out of the Republic of Letters, and that has been taking refuge anywhere they would dance to jazz and beauty is not legislated.
"La La Land" comes from that world. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling can neither sing nor dance. But the film is not about singing or dancing. It is about living, which is singing and dancing, and playing, and wagering, and daring, and hiding, and winning and losing, but never looking back for too long. Stone and Gosling can do that.
The musical does not attempt to resuscitate the Musical. Instead, "La La Land" aims at inventing the musical. It is a litmus test of the past seventy-eighty years of the civilisation. If progress has been made, the invention would differ from, and, in some ways, surpass, the original. It is a better world now indeed.
One should not mourn the world that could have been, for that is the world that has made the world that is here today possible.
"Everything passes," said Maricela N.
"Now, you can't live your life like that..." said Woody A.
All passionate to be and to create and, in that, all citizens of the world that has grown out of the Republic of Letters, and that has been taking refuge anywhere they would dance to jazz and beauty is not legislated.
"La La Land" comes from that world. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling can neither sing nor dance. But the film is not about singing or dancing. It is about living, which is singing and dancing, and playing, and wagering, and daring, and hiding, and winning and losing, but never looking back for too long. Stone and Gosling can do that.
The musical does not attempt to resuscitate the Musical. Instead, "La La Land" aims at inventing the musical. It is a litmus test of the past seventy-eighty years of the civilisation. If progress has been made, the invention would differ from, and, in some ways, surpass, the original. It is a better world now indeed.
One should not mourn the world that could have been, for that is the world that has made the world that is here today possible.
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