That LA dream.

I recently watched La La Land after hearing so much about it. I wasn't sure what to expect, except I knew that people really loved it, there's some singing, a nod to old time movies, and something about LA.

On my way to Ethiopia, the movie came up on my movie selection list. Delighted, I clicked on it.  As I catapult myself at 500 miles per hour, moving farther and farther away from home, to a place that feels like you stepped back into time, the movie starts in a traffic jam.

Traffic jams and Los Angeles are as ubiquitous as crabs and Baltimore. Nice nod. I was fascinated that they closed an onramp to do this scene and wondered which freeway they were on (the 105 and the 110 - as a person familiar with the freeways, I was both fascinated and angry at the same time.) At first, the movie didn't really catch my attention aside from that scene, but my mind was distracted. Towards the middle, as the relationship between the characters began to build I started to pay attention. I ended up crying at several scenes (first off, I was emotional from some other life events) and leaving home for an extended period of time always makes me emotional regardless of how many times I do it. There's a scene where you really feel her pain when she discusses the defeat she feels during auditions and never having a yes. She then uses that defeat to give up and you can hear her as she says that. I resonated with it, having felt the same way. I can see why she got an Oscar for a role that seems so simple. She brought complexity to it in subtle ways and I appreciated her performance.

I also cried in the epilogue scene where the movie shows what could of been had the movie gone with happy scenes throughout the course of the entire journey with the characters. Then all of a sudden. they leave the happy colorful scenes to an abrupt stop into a white studio lot. It hits you that what you're watching isn't real and reality sets in. I watched the movie again after it was done.