After breaking out last year with the phenomenal film Whiplash, I am eagerly awaiting what the young writer/director Damien Chazelle has in store for us next. To my delight, his next film is a musical entitled La La Land. Even more to my delight, Emma Stone, hot off an Oscar nomination and a Broadway run in Cabaret, is in negotiations to star.
She would replace the role vacated by Emma Watson, who stepped off the project in order to do another musical, Disney’s live action Beauty and the Beast. Whiplash star Miles Teller also had to recently depart from the film. Eddie Redmayne and Ryan Gosling are two of the names in the ether to take on that part. Neither one has me as interested as Teller, but they are not horrible replacements in the slightest. Out of the two, I’d hope Redmayne gets the part.
La La Land is a love story between Mia, an aspiring actress, and Sebastian, a jazz pianist, in, if you had not guessed by the title, Los Angeles. It sounds like a rather old fashioned musical, and I am totally okay with that. Sometimes you just need a classic feeling musical romance. And with Stone’s involvement, I am certainly excited. She’s proven herself a great actor and is a decent singer as well. We’ll see who her partner ends up being.
