Current Events > Just saw The Greatest Showman

(+) Yeah! (+)

I liked it way more than La La Land honestly
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I strongly prefer LaLaLand, in spite of its issues.

Spoilers, obviously:
I felt like LaLaLand was more cohesive in that it was two stories being forcefully welded together, instead of three or four stories being welded together.

There's more of those numbers here where the plot kind of stops and waits for the song numbers to conclude for things to resume.

There's no conflict in this movie. The critic dude isn't a conflict, the mob is largely forgotten about for 1.5 hours, the parents are here for all of five minutes, and when they come back I had I'd largely forgotten about them. The best case for there being an external conflict is the potential affair the singer imagines for them, and that whole plot takes place in a musical number, and is shot with unusual gravitas given how nothing has happened yet between them.

The movie wants me to conclude at the end that they conflict was purely an internal one surrounding Barnum's efforts to escape the psychological scars of his life of poverty, but that's not really supported by the rest of the film. What we see of his impoverished upbringing doesn't seem all that traumatic, and the process of working himself out of it on the railroad is time skip we never get to see. The rest of the movie doesn't support this whole internal conflict either. Maybe there's a fear that his wife will leave him if he never makes it big, but she never does anything to suggest that she's unhappy with their current circumstances. This all just frustrates me as an audience member when he is the only person in the whole movie that can't see that.

This movie felt like a live action Sing to me. I like it more than Sing, thankfully, but only just.
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I really liked La La Land, so I'll have to check this out
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