劇情上很是好萊塢style劇本，很寫實，然而全片最精彩的 "主角"，就屬是那些多樣性旋律與樂曲(jazz piano, Broadway , swing , pop)

每個世代，民族都會藉由音樂來描述他們當下的生活，Jazz音樂也是一樣，早期美國黑人從其非洲傳統音樂發展出來，敘說底層人物的故事情感，期間相繼融J/ 5合、結合其它音樂元素後慢慢演變至今大家所聽到的音樂形式。我覺得就像早期的日本演歌，或是台語歌，將拆開歌詞來看的話，雖人文文化、音樂性及樂器的不同，但很多情感的表達其實是一樣的。個人覺得黑人文化音樂中，即便在悲劇也還是會有一種莫名的樂觀。比起演歌或台語歌，jazz聽起來較沒有那麼悲戚...(呵)。

「老是懷念過去，如何創新，音樂是要放眼未來」(意:台詞)

我想這句詞是導演想送給所以想從事創作的朋友。創作很難「無中生有」，需有被啟發的點，被啟發點除了來自生活周遭事物、豐富想像力外，不就是前人走過的軌跡嗎? 雖說經典很難被超越，但總是能受其啟發。

例如，本片中的TAKE ON ME (1985)一曲，聽到時，真的有點驚嚇到，哈 ~  「a-Ha」是1982年發跡於挪威的團體，中間短暫解散過，但為慶祝30週年，這二三年他們三位團員又重新聚集並開始一連串活動。後來的很多樂團都受其影響，包括coldplay在內。經典的TAKE ON ME，放置現今也無任何違和感，如果不說，應該很少人會知道這首的年齡、也不會知道這期間也被許多人翻唱過。

★電影中的大部份的音樂都是來自Pasek and Paul。
這兩人團於2010年組成，跟導演DamienChazelle及其御用作曲者Justin Hurwitz一樣年輕，平均才30歲出頭。光是這樣的組合，再看到本片及2014年 "Whiplash"  的腳本都是出自Damien Chazelle時，就可以看出Damien 想強烈表達的是，逐夢踏實的不易，不單是運氣、錢、更重點是自身擁有的才能與淺力是否足夠吸引人，當機會來時臨時是否可以掌握。天才有限，才能與淺力是需要靠努力累積。只要準備好，機會一來，隨時都可以出線，不會因為「年輕」或「需豐富成熟經驗」而被排拒在外。

★才能要如何具備? 要具備幾項才能足以等待到機會? 這答案雖沒有標準，但從選角上，我覺得導演很 “費心安排”，無形中遞出要競爭激烈的好萊塢出線，非得有好幾把刷子。

看過Ryan Gosling演的電影時，壓根不會想到他會樂器，呵，私下，他不僅組團也在2007年出了一張單曲。

Whiplash中飾鼓手的Miles Teller也是私下會玩多種樂器。

  **美影集House飾醫生的知名演員Hugh Laurie，更是從小學音樂，除了會多種樂
器之外，也在2011及2013分別出了兩張爵士樂專輯。

★導演Damien Chazelle本身也是多才多藝，除了能寫出出色的腳本，對音樂也有一定的涵養。2013的「Grand Piano」，描述音樂家受到不知名人士威脅的驚悚片，腳本跟節奏上的安排很讚，可也讓我嚇出一身汗來。

夢無法用想的，也不能遇到挫折時，就跟自己 "討價還價" 一番，光是追逐沒有用的 ! 有時可以有所懼(畢竟一開始誰不擔心害怕呢 ?!) 、但更須備的是百倍的勇氣、百倍的執行力及百倍的堅持!!

影片中，Sebastian後來接受Keith(JohnLegend 飾)建議加入他的樂團當鍵盤手，走比較POP型態。雖然一開始Sebastian不太接受，但連帳單費用都繳不出的情況下、如何開夢寐以求的Jazz音樂餐廳呢?  然而跟著樂團巡迴幾年後，他終於可以開一家屬於他自己的音樂餐廳，可以好好盡興地玩他要玩的音樂了........因為他從未放棄他的初衷，他只是從另一個角度去思考、去嘗試，不再陷入一種莫名與現實脫節的固執漩渦裡。

Keith對 Sebastia:  " 要開音樂餐廳，也要有觀眾 "  (意:台詞) ，這一段對話短卻是一針見血阿!   

Jazz樂就是雅、POP就是俗 ?  ..... NO !
古典就是王道、輕音樂就是俗.?...NO!  

夢想是需要堅持、但不是故步自封；夢想的旅程中，需要許多的包容力、不是孤芳自賞 !  

跟大家分享最近看到的一段話  >>>>

「生命中一定有些事，值得你這樣 :
 你夠成熟，知道那是傻事
但你夠年輕，還是撂落去了」

 「尋夢的路不是直的，天使不會自動停在家門口。飛不起來的時候，我就用走的的。不管走不走得到目的地，旅程本身，就是天堂。」

BY(王文華)

DJ我一直在撂落去了的狀態 ~~且走得很勤 ~~哈哈 ~
我的朋友們，一起繼續向前走ㄅㄟ ^0^

有爵士就少不了Swing囉，
蠻喜歡專輯中的Herman’s Habit與Epilogu  ^0^

( Pasek and Paul的訪談內容)

♦LA TIMES-Daryl H.Miller 20161201

……On Friday, they hit the big screen with their savvy, swooning lyrics to Justin Hurwitz’s songs for “La La Land,” writer-director Chazelle’s newfangled yet delightfully old-fashioned musical about romance and ambition in glittering, heartbreaking Los Angeles.

Pasek and Paul were eager to work with Chazelle and Hurwitz, another pair of 31-year-olds, who had teamed for the hard-charging musician’s tale “Whiplash” and the music-driven romance “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench.” 

Pursuing the job played out like something that the showbiz dreamers of “La La Land” themselves might experience: After a phone-conversation audition, Pasek and Paul heard seven of the most dreaded words in Hollywood: “They liked you, they didn’t love you.”

“Then,” Paul recalls, “we got some crazy advice: Go to L.A.; just show up and say, ‘Hey, we happen to be in L.A.; let’s meet.’

“So we took them out for pizza and we all just sat and talked about musicals that had inspired us and some of those shared loves and passions. Then the next day we presented them with a version of a song that we might write lyrics for, which became ‘City of Stars’ ” — now one of the movie’s principal songs.

“We want to continue to challenge ourselves to write different kinds of shows, about different subjects and in different styles,” Paul says. Pasek adds: “We really are living our dream right now.”

♦For the La La Land Lyricists, Getting Hired Was Like Looking in the Mirror- Kevin Lincoln

One day back in July of 2014, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s managers called them with a strange message: They had just met them.

“They were basically like, 'We met your match in L.A. We met these two guys, they’re both 29' — I think we were 29 at the time — 'best friends from college, they love musicals, and you guys have to work with them,'” Paul said, recalling their introduction to future collaborators Damien Chazelle and Justin Hurwitz. “And we’re like, Okay, that sounds great!”

The quote above is attributed to Paul, but it could just as easily have gone to Pasek. The two men, who are both 31 now and have the natural, easy charm of born entertainers, tell stories in a sort of collaborative unfurling, starting and finishing each other’s sentences. Their friendship goes back a decade, to their college years at the University of Michigan; they have the almost genetic rapport of two people who have spent years working together.

At the time the duo met their doppelgängers, Chazelle and Hurwitz were relative unknowns: Whiplash's five Oscar nominations were still half a year away, and all Chazelle had to his name was a feature he’d made in college — the improvisational not-quite-a-musical Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench — and a few screenplays. Pasek and Paul, meanwhile, had already been nominated for a Tony for their work on A Christmas Story, The Musical and had had songs featured in the second season of Smash, though they’d yet to make their entry into film. By their own recollection, they “had no money.”

Chazelle and Hurwitz were looking for lyric writers for a project they had in the works, and even though Pasek and Paul wrote both music and lyrics, their management was so enthusiastic about the pairing that they figured they’d pursue it. Initially, the four men connected over the phone, discussing their love of emotionally honest, sincere musical theater rather than the kind of productions that made fun of the fact that characters were breaking into song.

Pasek: “I remember, we ended that phone conversation, and we talked to our agent—”

Paul: “—and the feedback that came in, or at least their interpretation of it, was, ‘Okay, so we talked to them, and you know what, I think they like you, but they don’t love you—’”

Pasek: “—and we’ve since said this to Damien, and he’s like, ‘You’re crazy,’ but like, it could be true?”

To turn that like into love, their manager had an idea: They should go out to L.A. — on their own dime, of course — and tell Chazelle and Hurwitz that they were going to be in town — for other reasons, of course. There, they could have dinner and seal the deal. It worked. Before the meeting, Chazelle and Hurwitz gave them a piece of music to work with. It was called “Ballad,” and it was the tune that would eventually become “City of Stars.” They wrote some tentative lyrics on the flight out. Pasek described their dinner at L.A. mainstay Pizzeria Mozza as a “nerd fest,” with the group realizing a shared adoration for the same strain of musical theater — “MGM classic musicals and the Alan Menken–Howard Ashman Disney musicals, and Sondheim and all that stuff.” They even happened, purely by coincidence, to be staying in the same apartment complex that Hurwitz lived in.

“I guarantee you that, had we pulled in behind them, they would’ve thought we literally were stalking them,” Pasek said. “Thank God our car got there first.” 

From there, it was a match, and their partnership would eventually result in La La Land, the current front-runner for Best Picture and a surefire contender in a host of other categories — including and especially Best Score and Best Original Song, where the film has earned two Golden Globe nominations. In fact, the real question regarding Best Original Song isn’t whether Pasek and Paul will be nominated, but which piece from the movie will get the nod, the favorites being “City of Stars,” the Ryan Gosling–Emma Stone duet that anchors the film’s emotional narrative, and “Audition,” Stone’s show-stopping finale.

As Pasek and Paul dug into writing the movie’s lyrics, they tried to combine that touchstone they shared with Chazelle and Hurwitz — the romanticism and idealism of those old musicals, with a modern sensibility that would fit the characters of Sebastian (Gosling) and Mia (Stone). Pasek described Chazelle's vision of the film as “Los Angeles being this mecca for dreamers where these people come to pursue seemingly impossible pursuits, and how it’s heartbreaking and exhilarating simultaneously,” and they sought to balance those two concepts in their lyrics.

“We knew from Justin’s music that it was bittersweet, that there was aching and longing and optimism and acknowledgement of failure,” Paul said, and that concept ended up making its way into the final version of “City of Stars.” “Ballad” had originally been written just for Mia, but as the duality of La La Land became clear, the song transformed into a duet; in the film, it soundtracks a montage that follows the arc of Sebastian and Mia’s relationship from wide-eyed lovers to a couple who have to reconcile their personal ambitions with their mutual involvement.

Pasek describes “City of Stars” as having a “fierce irony” in the hands of Chazelle, and their lyrics play no small role in establishing that. Few songs of new love feature lines so foreboding as, “Is this the start of something wonderful and new? / Or one more dream that I cannot make true?” The sentiment works referring both to the relationship between the two characters, and the promise they see in Los Angeles. “It was always Damien’s intent that the first time you view it, it should be a song where you’re like, Oh God, it’s a love song,” Pasek said, “and the second time you’re like, It’s heartbreaking.”

Meanwhile, all of this was still happening pre-Whiplash. At the beginning of their collaboration, Chazelle had quizzed Pasek and Paul about what it was like to get their Tony nominations. But when he invited Pasek and Paul to the premiere of his new film, the dynamic shifted just a bit.

“For us, we were onboard because he was smart, passionate, and you could tell he loved musicals and movie musicals,” Pasek said. “So we were convinced because, meet the dude. But then, after we began this collaboration, I guess four months later Whiplash premiered at the New York Film Festival and then we sat and we watched the movie and we were like, Oh. My. God.”

During the Oscar run of Whiplash, Pasek and Paul got to watch the director they’d thrown their lot in with become a top-tier filmmaker, and the expectations for La La Land rise accordingly. But they still had to make the movie. Pasek and Paul were in New York while Chazelle and Hurwitz were in L.A., and they’d trade work back and forth over email and phone until that wasn’t an option anymore, at which point they’d meet in person and hammer out final versions.

Final, at least, until Chazelle and Hurwitz were on set, when Chazelle would occasionally decide to go in a different direction. “There were definitely moments where he would choose lyrics that were our second choice, but we trusted him,” Paul said. Film is a director’s medium, and as Paul puts it, “the smartest thing we ever did was trust him.”

Now that trust could prove Oscar-worthy — but even if it doesn't, Pasek and Paul should be fine. Their new 
show, Dear Evan Hansen, which they were developing in Washington, D.C., during the shooting of La La Land, just opened on Broadway to rave reviews after a successful Off Broadway run.

Loosely inspired by a story from Pasek's youth about a socially anxious high-school senior who becomes involved in a family's grieving over the death of their son — and featuring heavy doses of social media — Dear Evan  Hansen covers significantly different ground than La La Land, making the concurrent musicals a testament not only to the talents of their songwriters,but to the sincerity with which Pasek and Paul are pursuing musical  theater. Pretty soon, some manager might be telling his young clients to go book a flight to try and impress them.


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