La La Land
Pros: The best thing about this movie is its music. Hands down, best original music since Once. It's really simple, but so effective. Also, the cinematography is gorgeous. We loved the costumes. All the external factors are just right, nothing is amiss. Okay, some might disagree, but we thought that Emma Stone was pretty phenomenal. Her voice, her look, her everything just fit perfectly. And personally, we loved her low, husky and gentle voice. We like distinctive voices (after all, our favourite singers are Kate Bush and David Bowie). We can't deny that the movie uses film language expertly. The director clearly had a vision for the style and how he wanted the film to look.
Cons: The problems we have with this film spring entirely from the story and the characters, which are the two most fundamental factors for us when deciding whether we like a movie or not. The story suffers from major intertextual dissonance. What they seem to have missed, is that when you reference another creative source, the audience creates a connection with that original source, and they expect it to pay off later in the film. That's how intertextuality works. For the most part, the movie references nostalgic, fluffy, happy-go-lucky, golden age Hollywood musicals, so one would expect those references to pay off somehow. Instead, at the last minute, they decide to take the road of the Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which simply does not do because they have not laid the groundwork for that particular pay off. The ending is completely detached from the rest of the film. Also, don't try to frame your selfish protagonists as altruistic. Now, don't get the wrong message, we love selfish characters. But we love them because they are selfish (case in point, Lady Susan in Love&Friendship). We're supposed to believe that the circumstances messed up their relationship when, in fact, they were unwilling to compromise. This leads to another huge issue we have with the movie: the glorification of Hollywood. Essentially, this film really is just a massive hand job to Hollywood. If instead, it had criticized the fact that in order to make a living from creative professions, one needs fame and success... Now that's something we'd want to see. We really, really, really wanted to love this movie. So much.
Beauty and the Beast
Pros: Actors, even Emma Watson, we'll address the autotune later. The cast works really well, even though Luke Evans and Josh Gad probably stand out the best. Again, everything external works, it looks like a musical. Surprisingly, the new songs actually are functional and sound really good, not some random Broadway additions that grate our ears. The new character arcs for Belle's father and Le Fou were refreshing changes. Thankfully the musical arrangements were classical. It's pretty much the original Disney story with some minor alterations. We went in expecting to hate this film. Everyone knows our love for the original Disney animation, it's in our top 10 of all movies, not just animation. However, we were able to look at this as a separate entity and not constantly compare it to the animation. 'Cause folks, there's no comparison, you know that.
Cons: That fucking autotune. It must've been some executive who decided that vocal cleanliness was more important than authenticity. It's not. Autotune is an emotion killer, which really doesn't work in a musical. It seems that the director might have been good with actors on set, but production elements like cinematography and editing have not been his strong suits. We wish it had been someone with clear, individual, artistic vision and a flair for the dramatic. Disney had that director, but they wasted him on something as boring and superficial as Cinderella. This definitely would have benefited from Branagh's Shakespearean scale directing. Sigh. The director isn't fluent in film language. There's too much dialogue and not enough silence. They seem to suffer from Nolanism as well. The last big problem we have is that they tried fixing non-existent flaws of the animation. Even students of literature could tell you, the original fairytale does not suffer from Stockholm syndrome. You're supposed to be professional writers, you should know better. Then we have some minor gripes, that don't really bother us, but we want to mention them. Like Mrs. Potts stealing the Beast's line about loving Belle, focusing too much on the servants before the transformation scene and talking about the transformation scene, they totally should have milked it more! It's the pivotal scene in the story!
Comparison: Emma Watson and Ryan Gosling are pretty much equally (not) talented when it comes to singing. Their voices aren't unpleasant nonetheless. Although Emma Stone clearly isn't a singer either, she has natural talent and knows how to use emotion in her voice. La La Land is very aware of Gosling's limitations which is why he sings so little and only in the easy songs. Emma Watson has most trouble delivering in the original songs because you'd need at least a trained musical actor to sing those parts. In the new songs, she's fine, because they're written for her. The rest of the cast can sing so well, that it's not that big of a deal for us. La La Land's use of film language is superior to Beauty and the Beast, but the latter takes the cake in story and characters. As musicals go, we find they both fare equally well. Beauty and the Beast already had a pretty solid story, so all they needed to do was to not screw it up completely. As previously discussed, we found La La Land's story to be fundamentally weaker. In addition, Beauty and the Beast has quite a rich tapestry of minor characters, whereas we could not think of one from La La Land who had any significance for the story. A film is often made better by its minor characters, although occasionally they can steal the protagonists' thunder (like those few moments before the transformation scene in BatB), but they could also have elevated La La Land's story (for example, Mia's husband). Oh, and then there's the covert sexism, which again, is worse in La La Land. Like why does Mia need to be married? Apparently it's still outside the realms of possibility in Hollywood for a single woman not wanting to get back together with their single ex. And you know what, we might have actually liked the film without bringing a useless husband to the story. That is how you should've subverted those Hollywood romances. Now the husband is simply a prop, instead of a compelling minor character that might have brought some depth into the story. The covert sexism in Beauty and the Beast we're willing to forgive more easily as it originates from the animation (plus unsurprisingly, the fairytale is a little sexist - it's a fairytale, people). Covert sexism in this story comes in the form of shifting Belle's character arc from the fairytale to the Beast. The animation was the first to do this, and the movie went with it. But it goes down easier, because it's not trying to be anything more than an unapologetic romance. All in all, both of these films are pretty vapid and while we agree with most critics that La La Land is the better movie overall, we happened to like Beauty and the Beast more. It shocked us too.
