EVERYONE  SAYS THEY LOVE  LA LA LAND   by Perkin Warbeck

Sometimes it’s easier to allow one’s inner cat get his way and so, one found oneself in the last week curiously entering a cinema , hoping for two simple things: that nobody had spotted one and that the fillum wouldn’t be as brutal as one feared.

Actually, it wasn’t. Indeed, it turned out to be quite a pleasant way to pass an afternoon. The reason why one feared the worst was the right-across-the-clapperboard rapturous reception it had received from the usual suspects, from the Galiphate in CNN and BBC to their Jennipotentiaries in RTE and The Unionist Times

Tús maith na hoibre, as they say, and this motion picture certainly got off to an animal cracker of a start and in a static location too: a traffic jam on a LA freeway. When the music sounds then – hey presto ! – the occupants of the stalled automobiles frenetically emerge from their seats, drivers and passengers alike, and do a daemonic dance routine. This involved the energetic hopping on to bonnets, roofs and back down on to the asphalt itself.

For this Hoofing on the Roofs routine the choreography is adorable. All done in day-glo colours and who’d have thought that LA could look so good? Tá LA taghta. The budget for this Damien Chazzelledirected movie was 30 million dollars: Cash for Brash, one might say.

And immediately one was reminded of another movie whose platinum anniversary it was last year (That means it was made 20 years ago, chaps).

More of which anon. Except to hint that: while both movies have jazz as a central theme, in the other movie it is carried as freight with no bells or whisltes attached, La La Land does, by contast, tend to bang on about jazz being a synonym for The Future in such a way as even Fr. Tedium himself might have cause to yawn.

Ryan Gosling, as the idealistic jazz pianist who wants to open his own club one night (Tiofcaidh m’Oíche might be his mana/ mantra) once more effortlessly reminds one what a class act as an actor he is.

Hiis co-star, Emma Stone is really up against it on the big wide silver screen where there is no hiding place; she is far less pretty than her co-star. She plays a barista hoping to make it as an actress, while simultaneously playing the ugly d. to the big G. One mentions this as it is another point of convergence with the other movie, though coming from a differing direction. (see below, and below is the operative w.)

The Griffith Observatory has never looked better in a movie than it does here in La La Land , and it has had a stand-up role in many a motion picture in its night. Bearing more than a passing resemblance to the gold-domed Mosque in Jerusalem, it serves a dual purpose.

Looking across at the Hollywood Sign during the day and later, the Sky at Night, it facilitates those interested in astronomy in the latter instance and those absorbed in, erm, astrology in the first instance.

Colonel Griffith J. Griffith (who donated the land upon which the Obervatory was built in 1935) would have apporoved of its dual role. The old Colonel was so good at sounding double his contemporaries did the predictable.

The dialogue is quite dandy too:       :

-I’m letting life hit me untill it gets tired. Then, I’ll hit back. It’s a classic rope-a-dope.

And:

-You’re fired.

-It’s Christmas .

-Yeah, I see the decorations. Good luck in the New Year.

It was a friend (whose judgement one trusts – as they say in the media) who first recommended the other movie to one – not that it needed recommending. He had seen it in 1996 at a venue where there were only two other patrons at the afternoon showing : a suburban motion picture house in Stillorgan, Dublin 14.

The other two patrons were Michelle Rocca and her not insignificant o. , Van Morrison. (She has, of course, since become Bean Van ).

-Hey, Perk, does this make me a celebrity?

One’s trustworthy friend rang one to enquire, re attending movies in a near-empty afteroon auditroium.

-Hold on, a chara. And while you’re at it hold on also to your night time identity.

One mentions this chance encounter because of a not irrelevant banner which once namechecked Ms. Rocca. What made it unusual was the location of the banner– on the crowded terrace at the Havelock Square end of Lansdowne Road during a soccer international in the early 80s. The banner read:

-John Devine has better legs than Michelle Rocca.

This banner (wrong on both counts) was an early example of a phrase yet to be invented;

-Fake News.

The context was : John Devine was playing for the R of I and had recently returned from his honeymoon. He was Michelle Rocca’s first husband. And the flakiness of the message imparted is based on the ancient adage that is is a , erm, Divinity which shapes our lower ends, rough hew them as we will.

The Perkin’s inner fake snowflake at the time can recall being deeply appalled by this offensive impostor of a poster.

The dialogue of ‘Everyone says I love you’ (for it was it !) which one was reminded of is also all dandy, excapt there is so much more of it: not only is it dandy, but tis also beano, topper with even a hint of bunty itself about it.

Manufacturers of Potatao Crisps (from Tayto to Walkers to Smith to Pringle to Salty Dog) are in lock step in their loathing of Woody Allen much in the same way as the Galiphate of the media are too, though for different reasons.

In the case of the former it has been noticed that the sale of noisomely noisy paper bags of potato crisps drop alarmingly among the Discernerati during the run of a Woody Allen movie. That is because nobody wants to miss the next witticism which drop from the lips of The Wood with the same effortless ease of, say, a wet ball from the hands of a Mayo goalkeeper.

-My knowledge of art is limited to Kirk Douglas as Vincent VanGogh.

And:

-Carol was a poet and a member of MENSA.

-She was a heroin addict !

-Yeah, she was also a heroin addict, but I thought it was insulin, and so how was I to know?

And:

-(Bob,discovering his son is a Republican) : Steffi, bring down a copy of my will – and an eraser.

‘Everyone says I love you’ is also replete with the impromptu drop-of-the-hat dance routine which the real world (alleged) could well do with.

Three eaxamples will suffice:

-The exhillerating routine involving the patients, staff ( from nurses to doctors to domestic to security ) in a maternity hospital , maniacally pushing trolleys and gurneys while miming to the sly melody of ‘Making Whoopie’ , culminating in the presentation of the, erm, inevitable.

(There is brief case to made that this particular routine ought be shown on RTE News anytime the -yawn, stretch, trouser-cough – item on patient-freighted trolleys in Free Southern Stateen hospital corridors is featured on the agenda. Use of a split screen might well be the way to go about it).

-A spectral Grandpop rising out of his coffin at his own wake to get the gathered mourners to join him in an inspired dance routine to the toon of:

-Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.

And:

-The final dance routine in Paris where all the participants are dressed as Groucho Marx, including the ladies, wearing fake moustaches, to the toon of ‘Hurray for Captain Spaulding’. This is an inspired homage from one comic genius to another.

There are other gleaming gems, too many to mention: enough to namecheck Tim Roth as the deadpan, cold-eyed hit man, Itzhak Perlman playing the violin as Itzhak Perlman, and Woody himself, his head bowed low with many apologies, crossing a bridge in Paris with a de rigeur baguette under his arm.

And just as Michelle Rocca’s legs are better (looking, one presumes) than John Devine’s (never having seen V. Morrison’s, one cannot comment on the latter contest, TG) so also is ‘Everyone says I love you’ a superior movie to La La Land. Which is nothing, incidentally, to be huffy about.

Though one would never guess that if one were to depend upon the Galiphate and other Streeps who pound the sidewalks of Hollywood, for one’s decision-making processes.

The timing of ‘Everyone says I love you’, incidentally, like all subesquent Woody Allen movies, was of the rank, bad variety. Coming as it did in the immediate wake of the upturned Mia Farrow wheelbarrow of whinge. The Galiphate of Aunt Samantha neither forgive or forget one of the few   genuine contemporary geniuses of the US of A for that. There is little room for WA WA Land in the Land of Aunt Samantha.

And when the time comes for The Wood to be shoved into the furnace of the final farewell the Irish chapter of the Galiphate (of both genders) is unlikely to break into the doleful dige, that is:

-Cad a dhéanfaimaid feasta gan Adhmad / What will we do without The Wood?

No Cash for the Inheritor of the Groucho Tash.