It's back to basics, back to the original beauty of the movie. City of Love fulfills all my fantasies about cinema, the beauty of the scenery, the innovation of the traditional form, the structure of the cliché, and the tribute to the golden age, not to mention the original soundtrack, which can bring tears to my eyes just by listening to it. The direction is very mature and old-fashioned, not only ambitious but also talented enough, and the song-and-dance element is pretty much the entire history of the song-and-dance movie for fans of the fandom.
"City of Love" is the Hollywood performance of inspirational, indulgence in self, ambitious self-expression, ostensibly the city of love, in fact, the city of love of film, behind the dream, love, nostalgia, celebrate the golden age, is the innovation and outlook. It is a romantic and beautiful love movie, and many passages make you feel like revisiting ? Song in the Rain? s feeling. It is the City of Love, the City of Stars, and the place where dreams and reality begin and end. It proves how important it is to have a good ending, which takes an otherwise bland narrative one step further! Even with tears streaming down my face, my chest is warm as a campfire.
The analogy to "The Artist" is that it goes back to basics to tell a popularized love story in the form of music and song and dance film, and the main technique is at its peak. Tying together different music, song and dance genre branches of film history (MGM, Golden Sisters Fred, Big Jazz, Jacques Demy and contemporary band films, concert films) in different paragraphs, both heritage and bring out the evolution of the genre, retro and innovative, and can sublimate the theme of love, inside and outside.
Some might argue that the movie is an American Dream complex of awkward dancing and off-key singing that's boring as hell. The golden age of Hollywood song-and-dance movies was the 1930s through the 1950s. City of Love caters to modern nostalgia and is shot in a retro style. But its dance moves are stiff, the songs are vomit-inducing, the plot is all routine, and the performances are deliberately awkward. It's completely prestigious, but actually very bad, and can be largely described as the worst song-and-dance movie ever made.
The story may be clichéd, but the key to a song-and-dance movie is the music. Not only is every song good, but the main post song, with its various variations throughout, is even better. And the subtle framing, the LA at sunset is really beautiful. Cabaret has been passed down as a specific genre for almost a hundred years, and it has a better ability to render emotions. So not being able to watch it or not liking it is largely not a matter of artistic appreciation, but rather a difference in emotional appeal in a particular cultural context.
In any case, the opening scene of the big mirror to the end of the song and dance passages stunning, dream/love portrayal delicate, a variety of dazzling long shots, changing lighting, retro art design to show a very different from the explosive drummer audio-visual infectious force, young director to realize the leap from the independent to the commercial type of film. Song and dance part of both the golden age of tribute and freshness with the times, a variety of clichéd Hollywood bridge, lighting, choreography and costumes are strong classic Hollywood flavor. The entanglement of dreams and love is even more reminiscent of the post-war golden age. It proves once again that the song-and-dance movie is the most soothing genre in an era of economic depression.
This sentimental movie is able to warm up and fondle the cruel reality in a play within a play. Like the director's previous film, The Exploding Drummer, it focuses on the disillusioned, and those who love it must also love the culture of minstrelsy, with its subtle homages to Rebel Without a Cause, The Beauty Shoppe, Casablanca, Nursery Row, and Shakespeare's Love Affair. Meanwhile, as far as the musical genre is concerned, the overall romance is stirring, the costumes and sets are on point, and it has the high, high tide of a tearjerker.
Some things are never recoverable once they are lost. When the director arranged for another life to be shown at the end of the movie, I was in tears. People in the world draw on riches and wealth, thinking that is happiness. When the dust settles, they look back and realize that there is another possibility. And in that possibility is true happiness. I believe that years later, this will still be a meaningful movie. It has all the fantasies of love, but also shows the magic of movie making dreams. Because of the movie, to make up for the defects of reality, because of the defects, we are so obsessed with love.