City of Stars

So the whole of my flat now officially have a Spotify playlist dedicated to musicals. And tbh I don't blame them. We've just come back from date night at the Broadway Cinema, our lovely little hidden treasure that allows us to treat ourselves all for the small price of £4.50. We watched La La Land and yes, I loved it, of course I did (I'm a 19 year old girl fgs) but there was one thing that stressed me out: the primARY BLOODY COLOURS.

From the get-go they were allllllll wearing stupidly bright colours. I'm very much into my muted, over-washed, saturated colours and anything that follows the blue, red, yellow and especially GREEN palette is a big fat no no. At one point, Mia (played by the wonderful Emma Stone) wore a bright yellow dress, with a red hand bag and blue shoes: my little heart brokeeeeee.

It turns out that the whole film was actually shot using actual film. After all, the idea of the film is to pay homage to 1950's Hollywood (what some people know as the Golden Age) and Technicolour. Director, Damien Chazelle, wanted the use of film to restore the 'magical' feeling to the motion picture, as he feels that digital cameras record reality so well that it loses all type of mystery and enchantment.

The colours also have another purpose, other than reminding an audience straight away that La La Land is in fact a musical, but it also monitors the trajectory of Mia and Sebastian's relationship.

Although Ryan Gosling is super dreamy whether he's recorded digitally or in film, both play their parts AMAZINGLY well. If I'm honest, I was most sceptical of Emma Stones part in La La Land, as I couldn't see me taking her singing, seriously.

Although some critics have commented on their strained voices as a weakness of the film, I actually really love the fact that they aren't the best singing voices ever. It sort of keeps you engaged in it, that it's magical and clearly a musical but is also relatable: I can mentally attach myself to these characters without any life long damage being made???

The way in which they softly melted into a song, how their dreams were realised through bizarre dancing in the stars and how their love was a consistent theme along side them achieving their ambitions through the tapping of a few piano keys (and breathe) was actually MAGIC. They definitely took the glitz and glam and dreaminess of what was Hollywood and revived it through the most iconic actor/actress of my generation in a seamless production. A tale of rejection, of being overlooked, to finding your other half, to pushing each other to them dreams, to only have to let them go in order to achieve their life long dream. Hard to get your head around right?

"For Mia's classic, retro-inspired wardrobe, Zophres looked at contemporary Vogue issues, plus to legendary actresses who inspired the character: Julie Christie, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Katharine Hepburn."

(http://fashionista.com/2016/12/emma-stone-la-la-land-costumes)

So, I've already discussed how stressed out the colours got me, but after investigating into it I've found reason and some sort of peace. Costume choices were made to fit the time, not to be on trend. Zophres studied Stone's past red carpet moments and took inspiration for Mia's yellow dress from Emma Stone's canary yellow Atelier Versace gown from her The Amazing Spider-Man 2 promo appearance in 2014. They also used fabric from the polyester section of Jo-Ann Fabrics after finding the same matching canary yellow shade. Zophres also recruited ager-dyer Rob Phillips to hand-paint Matisse-inspired florals onto this particular fabric.

Humble approaches were taken in not only the fabric of the final yellow dress but also for the approach to Ryan Gosling's wardrobe. The character was written younger than the 36 year old dream boat that is Mr.Gosling, so they looked to past jazz icons and influences such as Hoagy Carmichael, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Marlon Brando. As much as I questioned Sebastian's phase in the band that was overly successful for no particular reason and essentially DESTROYED his relationship with Mia, he was still pretty damn fine in his suit.

So to everyone involved in blessing me with La La Land, take a bow x