In short, this movie is another Hollywood echo-chamber. It's saturated with self-references and channeling itself. So out of touch with reality and narcissistic. Quite symptomatic, really. Thank God they gave us a clue in the name of their movie for us to have a grasp what this movie is about just by looking at its name.

The only reason these two (mentally ill, dissociated) characters fell in love with each other in the first place is because they realized this is what they had in common (mental illness and dissociation). So why the hell not be like this together? Better than to go through life alone with such misery anyway. Other than that, these two characters are stripped of any personality. To be fair, many classics of musicals this movie was trying hard to channel are guilty of that.

Just like in many musicals/romantic comedies/Hollywood tropes, these two people were thrown out at each other artificially. Let me get this straight, I don't know any woman who would memorize a guy like Sebastian and believe they're meant to be together despite the fact that all she knows about him is that once he showed her middle finger and was shaking his head at her in a car and later he shoved her aside while she was trying to compliment his piano play. It just doesn't work like that.

It was good at mechanistically channeling musicals and Hollywood, but it was doing so unenthusiastically. I know that musical movies tend to have lack of good singing because they usually take famous actors with little to no musical background to play. But in this case, maybe the film could benefit from better singing and dancing if the script and idea were so bad. And no, Sebastian, you're not playing jazz. You're just playing one mediocre pop song that is styled as vintage.

Big theme of this movie is ''follow your dreams'' which almost always happens to be a dream of making it in the entertainment industry for some reason. As if people who watch this can't dream of something other than that. It's interesting that many Hollywood and Disney movies have been having this cliché theme throughout decades. Big question: why?

I kind of get it why many people received this movie well and believed all the hype and that it deserved Oscars. One of the reasons is, of course, because they just eat whatever is being fed to them by Hollywood and mainstream all the time. Another one is that large portion of society lives in this la la land. In our capitalist society people are alienated from reality and they live in a fantasy major corporations create for them to escape. They also dream about mythical love and having a dream-like career. Even their dreams are not something they created. I'm saying all that because I recommend you to read Zizek's review of La La Land.