I watched La La Land recently, that film you may remember from 2016. Yeah. Yeah, no, yeah. Yeah it was good. Two thoughts: first, I think the preferable way to watch films that everyone seems determined to have a loud opinion about is to do so eight years after the fact, meaning I will be watching Barbie some time around 2031.
And second: wow, what phenomenal chemistry Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling have in that movie. It helps that they are both such talented actors – Gosling is the planet’s greatest line-reader, I’m sure of it, and Emma Stone is yet to choose a bad project (unless Poor Things sucks, I won’t know until the year 2032, sadly) – but the way they fizz and crackle off each other, first in Crazy, Stupid, Love and then in this, is unlike any other on-screen partnership of recent years. It’s not just magnetic attractiveness but that playful back-and-forth, the easy charm, and the way you can believe they’d explode together in an epic argument just as much as live together for ever in love (see the Nick–Jess dynamic that sustained seven series of New Girl).
