I have always been a person who has never liked musicals and for mainstream movies, musicals are very rare. The new movie La La Land has just the right percentage of singing and dancing that for even a person who hates musicals, it never seems overdone. As a matter of fact, this entire movie was produced very well and had one of the best and most intelligent endings I have ever seen in any film I have ever seen. The brilliant ending showed an alternate world which was a message that whatever your dreams are, can you really have it all? The message of the ending was, sometimes if you want what you dream of, you have to give up something else.

The IMDB opinion score for La La Land is one of the highest ever posted, right now an 8.9 and I can see why this movie has been so popular. One reason is that it’s very unusual, unlike anything that has been done before. Yes, this movie is a musical but it the majority of the film is non-musical and the story behind it was very compelling and interesting. This movie is certainly about a love story, but mostly this film is about taking huge risk with your entire life in the hopes of making it in show business, either as a musician, played by Ryan Gossling or an actress played by Emma Stone.

One problem with show business and the very few that make it in any way and the fewer who make it big is that the payoff when you do make it is so completely out of proportion with any other profession in the United States or the world. Show business pays actors and singers far more than makes any sense and because of this and the way their lives seem to some poor kid in Nebraska, far too many young people move to California in the hopes of following their dreams of stardom. Someday there will be a 60 minutes-like documentary where the stark statistics that represent the reality and more importantly, the odds of making it in Hollywood or even as a musician will be produced. The odds are probably close to putting money on one number and winning 3 times in a row in Roulette. Given those long odds, does it even make sense to put all your money on one number and perhaps ruin your whole life on one hail mary pass? How many young people who move to California or New York even have a backup plan? These long odds are well demonstrated in this movie, with Emma Stone living in a bad apartment with 3 other roommates and Gossling living in another bad apartment and getting fired from his night job at a seedy bar where he plays the piano. The horrible Los Angeles traffic is also shown in this movie especially at the beginning along with Stone’s many auditions where she is ignored and rudely treated by the casting directors and at one point she almost gives up on her dreams entirely.

One can only imagine the nightmare of sitting in your broken down car on a hot day in traffic, traveling to another audition that you know you have no chance of getting and then working in your low paying bad job in a coffee shop. How many years and now many rejections can any person take at any age, when you’re faced with a daily existence like this?. What is the age where you finally realize that this dream is just not going to happen for you and you finally just give up? For every Emma Stone or Ryan Gossling or even Mark Wahlberg how many equally or even more deserving and talented people, just never get their lucky break? It is great to pursue your dreams but ultimately, is it worth the risk of wrecking your entire life and retirement to realize a goal that is so hard to reach? Do the very lucky few who do make it even realize how lucky they are? How many do make it, at least for a time but then are never able to reach those heights ever again or worse, never save enough money when their one chance in a lifetime comes through? These are all the questions I asked myself when I saw this movie. The ending of La La Land does have a nice Hollywood type of ending, but with a very intelligent twist on the happy endings we are all used to seeing in movies. I thought that this new twist with the happy ending was very well done as was the acting of Gossling, Stone and even the singer John Legend.

At first, I was reluctant to see this movie because it was a musical, but at the end, I was convinced that this was a very good movie that will be nominated for best picture this year and it does get my strong recommendation.

As for the release of the new comedy movie Why Him? starring Bryan Cranston, a better title would have been, Why This Movie? I recently saw Cranston being interviewed in 60 minutes and the interviewer asking him about Breaking Bad and his success in so many different movies and even on Broadway, where he played Lyndon Johnson. He responded that he was on a mission to strike while the iron was hot and make as much money and as many movies as he can before his winning streak finally ends. Unfortunately, it is clear that by making this bad movie that he could not find a way “do both”. That is, make a high-quality comedy movie and also make the money too. Of course, Cranston read the script for this movie, realized it was a pretty bad script but he took the part anyway, either for the money or perhaps to do a favor for someone or because he wanted to please his contacts so in the future they may come up with something much better. So, 6 months of his time is wasted and millions of dollars are spent and another bad movie is made.

This movie also stars Cedrick the Entertainer , Megan Mullally,
James Franco and Zoey Deutch who are all talented actors and who all read the script and still agreed to do this bad movie. My theory is that the movie business is so fleeting and precarious that if you turn down any offer, you might be perceived as difficult and you might not get another role. The strangest example of this phenomenon is early this year when Robert Deniro took the lead role in Dirty Grandpa, which was an absolutely horrible movie. It seems for many actors who make movies, that its money first and then integrity.

The entire plot of this movie can be summarized very simply. An internet millionaire gets involved with an attractive and 10 years younger Stanford Student and when his parents meet him, they find out he is a foul-mouthed disgusting lowlife. From this point on this film mostly slapstick and mostly unfunny series of scenes that mostly didn’t work and there were very few laughs in the theater I was in, which is always my acid test for all comedy movies. A prime example of the raunchy disgusting path this movie follows is that when we are shown a giant glass enclosure of a stuffed buffalo where the animal is emersed in his own urine, you kind of knew that later in the film something disgusting will happen with this buffalo. And of course, it did. Is raunchy and foul-mouthed language always funny? No, it isn’t, with the possible exception of the Bad Santa movies. A great comedy movie is well written, subtle, has imagination and never relies on cheap gags to make people laugh. This is why great comedy movies are the rarest of types of films ever made.

For these reasons and so many others, Why Him? should be avoided.

The story concept of criminals in prison for life or on death row being released to do some kind of a difficult job that nobody else would do is not a new one. Two examples of this are the recent movie Suicide Squad, which was a bad movie and the 1993 film Point of No Return that starred Bridget Fonda and this was a good movie. The new film “Assassin’s Creed” starts out as another example of this kind of a story and then very quickly mutates into a movie that has one of the stupidest and most convoluted storylines that I have ever seen.

The main idea of this movie is about a scientist who wants to remove all violence from humanity and has invented a machine, along with her father that when hooked into the brain of a human being, allows them to connect with an ancestor from many centuries ago and somehow become that person, while they still exist in current time. No kidding that is the idea here. So this is not really a time machine, but just some kind of a machine that uses human DNA to connect back through time to a distant relative through your brain. This central concept and the scenes in this idiotic movie that show this machine working could just about be the dumbest thing I have ever seen in any film. In my opinion, the only thing interesting about this two hours of miserable mess is how four respected actors read the script and agreed to make this garbage. It isn’t just that the idea behind all of this is so stupid, but even the special effects are both bad and dark and very poorly filmed. The concept of how using this machine could somehow remove violence from humanity is never explained and towards the end of this horrible film there is some kind of a gold apple that has to be found in this distant world. The reason why this apple is needed to be brought back to save humanity is also never explained.

The actors in this movie include Micheal Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons and Charlotte Rampling and in my opinion a documentary should be made where these four respected actors are interviewed and they explain how or why they would ever agree to act in this movie. It’s that bad. Did they need the money? Did they owe someone a favor? Were they afraid if they don’t keep working that they would be forgotten? It just doesn’t make any sense.

Do yourself a favor and run from this horrible waste of 2 hours.