Lounge Loves: Preludes to the musical

The number of days left for Ryan Gosling-Emma Stone’s musical La La Land to release is inversely proportional to how tolerable the wait for it is. An excellent antidote: Stalk Ryan Gosling on Twitter. Gosling’s current display picture is a poster that seems inspired from an album cover of Blue Note’s Little LP series of vinyls. This one is closest to American Jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder—picture in a blue strip of inverted colours, album name in solid black, and artiste credits in a delicious orange, all overlaid on a pale cream base. This is the art for Audition (Fools Who Dream), one of the songs on the film’s OST. While the full album’s cover is minimal and classy, the art for City of Stars, the song we have heard on the trailer, squeezes the duo into cool-toned pop-art piano keys.

The two main movie posters, though beautiful, aren’t so diverse. They feature the same view of Los Angeles from the corner of an elevated road: lamp post on one side, Gosling and Stone on the other. One fills the city’s open skies with snippets of critical acclaim. In the other, the duo is frozen mid-dance, inspired by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers—as director Damien Chazelle has said in various interviews. Gosling and Stone aren’t strangers to recreating on-screen chemistry of yesteryear duos—think Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), where they play out Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey’s iconic Dirty Dancing (1987) scene.