Halrloprillalar

I said to a friend yesterday, I'm so committed to avoidance I'm even avoiding the things I was using to avoid the thing I'm meant to be doing. I'm meant to be writing a short book about recent films. And I enjoy writing about film, generally. But my brain keeps going... what if I leave it until later? Surely it will take no time to do this so I can write it all at whatever the last minute ends up being. Brain, no. And then it became, what if I re-sort the tags on my DW, to avoid browsing reddit, which was to avoid browsing tumblr, which was to avoid browsing plurk, which was to avoid reading blog posts, which was to avoid reading books, which was to avoid writing.

In other news I broke inspirobot:



It keeps giving me images that are actually inspirational.

Films watched this weekend:

• The DUFF, a teen film which I am at least 15 years too old to appreciate. Every beat was thoroughly predictable, down to the inspirational speech at the end. The only difference between this and teen films of my youth is that this one has internet bullying instead of just ye olde fashioned bullying and a mean girl that wants to be a reality star. But literally everything else was generic American teen film about quirky white middle class girl who doesn't quite fit in & etc. etc.

• La-La Land - I get the feeling that with this one the style is the substance. Beautiful use of colour and lighting and shot framing, for which we can thank Linus Sandgren who won the Academy Award. Gorgeous film to look at. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are reasonably good actors. But if you're casting a musical I think it might be a good idea to cast leads who can sing and dance at least better than I can, and I found much of the first two thirds of the film tedious.

Tedious white hipsters struggle with the idea that they might have to get grown up jobs and compromise by doing terrible things like actually promoting their work, sigh, but because it's a Hollywood film they end up with the dream jobs anyway. Gosling's character, Sebastian, was especially annoying. I found the scene where Mia was horrified to realise the band Sebastian had joined was playing fun music that people enjoyed especially eye-roll worthy. I believe it's meant to be at least in part an homage to musicals of the 50s, but instead of feeling like an homage it just felt regressive, uplifting white hetero mediocrity to some sacred thing. It never seems to quite know whether it wants to be Singing in the Rain or 500 Days of Summer, without the satire that livened up either.

I can see why my friend who liked it called it a three star film, though for me it was only a two star experience. Still, some of the sequences were enjoyable and I liked the parts John Legend was in.