Author: Admin

The 5th Biennial Stand Up To Cancer – September, 9

The 5th Biennial Stand Up To Cancer – September, 9

On September 09, Emma attended the 5th Biennial Stand Up To Cancer at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles

Gallery Links:
Public Appearances > 2016 > Hollywood Unites For The 5th Biennial Stand Up To Cancer at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, CA – September, 9
Photoshoots & Portraits > 2016 > Hollywood Unites For The 5th Biennial Stand Up – Portraits

‘La La Land’ Premiere – 73rd Venice Film Festival – August, 31

‘La La Land’ Premiere – 73rd Venice Film Festival – August, 31

Emma Stone stuns in silver at the premiere of La La Land and opening ceremony red carpet for the 2016 Venice Film Festival held at Sala Grande on Wednesday (August 31) in Venice, Italy.

Emma is wearing a Atelier Versacedress, Jimmy Choo shoes, and Selim Mouzannar jewelry at the premiere.

Emma_stone_002.jpgEmma_stone_008.jpgEmma_stone_016_001.jpgHQAdds_00005~1.jpg

La La Land reviews: Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling musical dazzles at Venice Film Festival

La La Land reviews: Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling musical dazzles at Venice Film Festival

La La Land had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, and it seems to have sang and danced its way into critics hearts.

The first reviews of the Los Angeles-set musical — the follow-up fromWhiplash director Damien Chazelle — are overwhelmingly positive, with high praise for stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, who play an aspiring actress and jazz musician falling in love as they struggle to make it in Hollywood.

Read on for takes on the film from those who saw it in Venice. Stateside, it’s set for a theatrical release on Dec. 2.

Pete Hammond (Deadline)
“Coming off the promise of the Oscar winning Whiplash, it will be no surprise that writer/director Damien Chazelle is a talented filmmaker, but that movie did not prepare me for the experience of seeing La La Land, his homage to the great screen musicals of French director Jacques Demy as well as MGM’s golden era. But this is too smart a movie maker to just do a simple tribute to a bygone era, his film starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone is a gorgeous romantic fever dream of a musical that should hit contemporary audiences right in their sweet spot.  It has been a very long time since we have seen something quite this lyrical, lovely, and most importantly, original on the screen, but at the same time it is a musical that has its feet firmly planted in the real world , even if the one up there on the wide Cinemascope screen is very stylized.”

Todd McCarthy (The Hollywood Reporter)
“Happily, the two leads are clearly entirely in synch with [Chazelle’s] objectives. Sebastian has a certain gruff impatience and short temper born of creative frustration, but the concern and love he feels for Mia doesn’t take long to well up. Gosling may not be a trained dancer or musician, but his moves are appealingly his own and months of piano practice have given him convincing style on the keyboards. Stone is simply a joy as the eternally aspiring actress it’s hard to believe is being passed over. Emotionally alive and able to shift gears on a dime, Stone is all the more convincing in this context as she has the kind of looks that would have been appealing in any era, particularly the 1930s and 1950s.”

Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian)
“It’s an unapologetically romantic homage to classic movie musicals, splashing its poster-paint energy and dream-chasing optimism on the screen. With no little audacity, La La Land seeks its own place somewhere on a continuum between Singin’ in the Rain and Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, with a hint of Alan Parker’s Fame for the opening sequence, in which a bunch of young kids with big dreams, symbolically stuck in a traffic jam on the freeway leading to Los Angeles, get out of their cars and stage a big dance number.”

RELATED: 78 Movies to See This Fall

Eric Kohn (Indiewire)
“At its best, La La Land probes the irony of its existence, celebrating the greatness of a bygone era in the context of changing times. ‘That’s LA,’ Sebastian concludes. ‘They worship everything and they value nothing.’ But that doesn’t stop him from getting fired up about the underlying power of classic jazz. ‘You can’t hear it,’ he implores Mia. ‘You have to see it.’ To that end, La La Land succeeds in making its sweet imagery sing, particularly with the sensational finale. In a wordless explosion of lights and shadows, Chazelle reignites the movie with fresh context that forces it to get real. Here, he arrives at the wrenching conclusion that even the most vibrant fantasy eventually must fade to black.”

Alonso Duralde (The Wrap)
“TCM addicts will swoon over that traffic-jam number, not to mention a dance sequence that delightfully defies gravity. The vocal duets between Stone and Gosling are charming even though they both have singing voices that might diplomatically be called ‘naturalistic.’ (Similarly, the songs by composer Justin Hurwitz and Broadway lyricists Pasek and Paul aren’t traditional show-stoppers, but they sneak up on you by the second reprise.)  … Gosling and Stone’s powerful chemistry is as palpable as it was in Crazy Stupid Love — they were that film’s sole selling point — and each of them conveys their character’s love of the arts and drive to succeed.”

Owen Gleiberman (Variety)
La La Land isn’t a masterpiece (and on some level it wants to be). Yet it’s an exciting ramble of a movie, ardent and full of feeling, passionate but also exquisitely — at times overly — controlled. It winds up swimming in melancholy, yet its most convincing pleasures are the moments when it lifts the audience into a state of old-movie exaltation, leading us to think, ‘What a glorious feeling. I’m happy again.’”

Source: EW

Venice Film Festival – “La La Land” Press Conference & Photocall – August, 31

Venice Film Festival – “La La Land” Press Conference & Photocall – August, 31

Given the occasion it was a suitably elegant Emma Stone who made an appearance in Venice Film Festival for La La Land press conference and photocall on August 31 (today).

The actress looked every inch the Hollywood star in a tasteful floral print dress that showed off her legs and as she signed autographs for fans in the picturesque Italian city.

Strappy orange heels gave the ensemble an added splash of colour, while an evident lack of accessories ensured its busy pink and green pattern was not overburdened.

You can check pictures in our photo archive. Please keep visiting because there are new photos every minute. Some of photos are in MQ and HQ.

00001~11.jpg00003~11.jpg00004~11.jpg00008~10.jpg

HQAdds_00002.jpgHQAdds_00008.jpg00003~12.jpg00007~12.jpg

Gallery Links:
Public Appearances > 2016 > ‘La La Land’ Photocall – 73rd Venice Film Festival – August, 31
Public Appearances > 2016 > ‘La La Land’ Press Conference – 73rd Venice Film Festival – August, 31

 

‘La La Land’: Emma Stone, Director Talk Bringing Back Hope in Films

‘La La Land’: Emma Stone, Director Talk Bringing Back Hope in Films

The actress who appears opposite Ryan Gosling in the musical, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, said the point of the film is to “let go of cynicism.”

Damien Chazelle’s new film La La Land is a welcome respite for moviegoers lamenting the general dark and dreary plots hovering over the general state of studio films. The young Oscar-nominated director (best adapted screenplay for Whiplash) has delivered a tour de force that pays tribute to European musicals of the ‘60s and ‘70s in his third feature film.

Emma Stone stars as Mia, a barista working on a studio lot in Los Angeles trying to make her way as an actress through humiliating audition after humiliating audition. She meets Sebastian, a down and out pianist who can’t find anyone who appreciates his love for jazz history. Over the seasons and sites of the city they falls in love, while breaking into classical song and dance, struggling to keep their relationship together over career difficulties and successes.

Even the most cynical audience member will have a hard time not smiling at the opening number, which turns a traffic standstill into a multi-car song-and-dance number on an extended city off-ramp. Indeed, both early morning press screenings caused journalists to burst into applause 10 minutes into the film. Early reviews and warm praise are already generating Oscar buzz.

At the press conference Chazelle, who arrived a week early to travel around, proclaimed his love for Italy and said before starting any questions, “I heard last week about the earthquake that hit and I want to say that on behalf of the film, our thoughts and prayers go out to anyone affected by it.”

Earlier in the day festival director Alberto Barbera and Jury President Sam Mendes kicked off the press activities, where it was announced that the Biennale was setting up a fund for the earthquake victims and La La Land studio Lionsgate would be the first to donate. It was announced last week that the opening night gala for the film would be canceled out of respect to the victims and that proceeds from the Architecture Biennale tickets for select dates would be donated to relief efforts. The central Italy earthquake claimed almost 300 lives.

Chazelle, whose first feature Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench was a musical, explained why he loves the genre so much. “Now more than ever we need hope and romance on the screen, and I think there’s something about musicals that just get at something that only movies can do,” he explained. “That idea of movies as a dreamland, movies as the language of our dreams and movies as a way of expressing a world in which you break into song, that emotions can violate the rules of reality.”

He admitted that it was a challenge to place a musical in today’s world, but he was able to fall back on the timelessness of classical musicals to find his way.

“I think there’s a way that the older musicals are timeless and it has a way to do with their simplicity,” he explained. “How do you justify a musical today? The way to justify it today is actually going back to a lot of those traditions. No one breaks into song unless it’s emotionally justified in some way. But once you allow yourself that possibility, then you have a responsibility to go all the way.”

For Stone, who has always loved musicals, it was a perfect fit for her. “I went and saw Les Miswhen I was eight on stage. So bursting into song has always been a real dream of mine.”

She was also very much drawn into the film by its pointed hopefulness. She referenced Conan O’Brien urging audiences to “let go of cynicism,” she paraphrased. “I think something about Damien and what Damien created, and the hopefulness and the joy and the beauty of this medium, is that this story is in no way cynical.”

“It’s about dreaming and hoping and working towards something to achieve something,” she continued. “And I think young people have fallen into a lot of cynicism and making fun of things and pointing out the flaws in everything. And this movie is anything but that and it’s a huge joy to be a apart of it.”

Stone said it was also a pleasure to work with her friend Gosling again. “Once you’ve learned to ballroom dance with someone, you’ve learned everything you need to know,” she said. “He’s very good at leading.”

But that was nothing compared to her praise for Chazelle, who she compared to her character Mia as “being a young person that’s putting yourself out there, creating something from scratch with all your heart, he’s doing that.” She also said that the fame hasn’t gone to his head and called him easily the most collaborative writer-director she has ever worked with, while staying true to his vision.

“That’s just rare of anyone of any age who has made a jillion movies,” she said of the 31-year old director. “He’s truly extraordinary.”

Chazelle also explained his idea of romance. “A lot of things can happen after ‘happily ever after.’ But when you have two people who share a memory, there is something very pure and nothing an taint that memory,” he said. “The idea was to take the old musical but ground it in real life where things don’t always exactly work out.“

Source: Hollywood Reporter

Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Damien Chazelle’s ‘La La Land’ Wow Venice

Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Damien Chazelle’s ‘La La Land’ Wow Venice

VENICE — Stars Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone  and director Damien Chapelle wowed the Venice Festival Wednesday morning with “La La Land” – and it took just 10 minutes.

And the Venice reception, if the first press screening and early reviews are anything to go by, will do nothing to stem the groundswell of opinion, backed by a terrific buzz on the movie before it even world premiered at Venice, that
“La La Land” is most certainly a serious Oscar contender in many departments.

Journalists – most Italian, but with a significant minority of international scribes – burst into spontaneous applause at “La La Land’s” first press screening after the musical’s first scene – a spectacular sustained single-shot song and dance number staged in an early morning tail-back on the L.A. highway.

Warm applause broke out at the end of the movie – which is pretty rare at Venice, where movies by venerable auteurs can be boo-ed.

As journalists and fest heads spilled out into the morning sun, on a beautiful day on the Lido, there was wide-ranging almost unanimous praise for Venice’s opening night film.

“La La Land” makes your heart beater faster and gives you a smile, which very few festival movies do these days,” said Karlovy Vary artistic director Karel Och.

He added: “And ‘La La Land’ is about Hollywood, the film industry and America,” predicting a strongly upbeat reaction for the movie in the U.S.

“It was pure poetry. They are incredible actors and singers,” said Tiziana Mantovani, an Italian journalist.

Variety

Magical musical to kick off star-studded Venice fest

Magical musical to kick off star-studded Venice fest

YAHOO! Venice (AFP) – A bewitching musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone will open the Venice film festival Wednesday, kicking off a US-heavy line-up of flicks vying for the coveted Golden Lion.

Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land”, described as a tribute to the Golden Age of American musicals, reunites the stars, who appeared together in the 2011 romcom “Crazy, Stupid, Love” — but with oodles of singing this time.

This world premier of the tale about a struggling jazz pianist and his actress girlfriend is the first of 20 films in competition at the 73rd edition of the world’s oldest film festival, which runs from August 31 to September 10.

The festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera described the flick by the director of Academy Award-nominated “Whiplash” (2014) as a movie “that does not merely reinvent the musical genre, it gives it a brand new start”.

This year’s line-up on the glamorous Italian island is notable not only for its A-list headliners, from Denzel Washington to Michael Fassbender, but also for the profusion of genre movies, he said.

Dystopian love stories, period dramas, adventure epics, revised Westerns and sci-fi thrillers are all showing at the Lido extravaganza, where Hollywood’s creme de la creme rock up in water taxis to dazzle on the red carpet.

– Virtual reality religion –

And Venice will be the first festival to host a special virtual reality viewing salon. A 40-minute preview of “Jesus VR” will see viewers “experience” the birth of Christ in the first virtual reality feature-length film ever made.

The beach-side festival has restored its reputation as an awards-season platform by producing the last two Best Picture Oscars, “Spotlight” and “Birdman”, in a challenge to the mammoth Toronto film festival.

All eyes will be on the jury, lead by British film director Sam Mendes, for hints as to the next Oscar favourite.

Security is high at the venue, with road blocks and bag checks after the summer’s jihadist attacks in Europe.

While champagne corks were popped and canapes scoffed at luxury Venice hotels on the eve of the festival, the gala dinner on the opening night was cancelled as a mark of respect following a deadly earthquake in Italy.

Films battling for the Lion include Iranian-American Ana Lily Amirpour’s “The Bad Patch”, set in a Texas wasteland and starring Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey, as well as Derek Cianfrance’s romantic period drama “The Light Between Oceans”, featuring real-life couple Fassbender and Alicia Vikander.

– Cigarette-smoking pope –

The pair, who famously met and fell in love on the set of the World War I period drama, play a lighthouse keeper and his wife who have problems conceiving but take in a baby girl washed up ashore in a boat.

Among the most anticipated premieres is legendary director Terrence Malick’s 3D documentary about the birth and death of the universe. “Voyage of Time”, a project 40 years in the making, is narrated by Cate Blanchett.

Mel Gibson will be making his directorial comeback after a 10-year break with “Hacksaw Ridge” about a World War II army medic who was the only conscientious objector ever to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Former creative director at Gucci, Tom Ford, who wowed critics and the public alike with his directorial debut “A Single Man” in 2009, is back with “Nocturnal Animals”, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

And there is already a buzz about the out-of-competition offering “The Young Pope”, a 10-part series by HBO telling the life of fictional Pius XIII, with a cigarette-smoking Jude Law as the first American pontiff in history.

‘La La Land’: Venice Review

‘La La Land’: Venice Review

Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to ‘Whiplash’ is an LA-set musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as a couple of Hollywood strivers who fall in love.

If you’re going to fall hard for Damien Chazelle’s daring and beautiful La La Land, it will probably be at first sight. There’s never been anything quite like the opening sequence: Traffic is at a standstill on the high, curving ramp that connects the 105 freeway to the 110 leading to downtown Los Angeles. Most of the cars are occupied only by single drivers, who are all listening to different music. But after a moment, instead of just sitting there simmering, somebody gets out and starts singing and dancing. Soon someone else does the same. Then another, and yet another, until a bad mood has been replaced by a joyous one as the road becomes the scene for a giant musical production number set to an exuberant big-band beat.

Aside from wondering how the filmmakers managed the logistics of pulling off such an audacious location shoot, lovers of classic musicals will be swept away by this utterly unexpected and original third feature from Damien Chazelle (opening this year’s Venice Film Festival). From a commercial point of view, the looming question for this Summit/Lionsgate release, set for December openings, is whether younger audiences will buy into the traditional conceits that Chazelle has revitalized, as well as into the jazz and lyrical song-and-dance numbers that fill the soundtrack.

Only foreign film connoisseurs of a certain age will realize that the writer-director’s true inspiration here stems not as much from vintage Hollywood musicals (although allusions to them abound) as from the late French director Jacques Demy’s two landmark 1960s musicals with Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort — especially the latter, which was far more dance and jazz-oriented. Although serious romantic longing and love’s poignant transience underpin the narratives for both Demy and Chazelle, both films share a breezy lightness of tone that keeps their narratives skipping along.

And while Chazelle’s breakthrough success two years ago with Whiplash also possessed a central, if eccentric, musical component, La La Land bears a much closer kinship with his mini-budgeted 2010 Harvard undergraduate feature Guy and Madeleine on a Park Bench, which was a sung-and-danced-through musical.

As did so many American musicals made before the mid-1960s, this one pivots on a simple boy-meets-girl/they fall in love/complications ensue scenario. For this to work at all, you need to have attractive and sympathetic leading actors, and once you see Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone go into their moves here, it’s as pleasurable to accept them in such roles as it once might have been to embrace, say, Gene Kelly and Shirley MacLaine.

Their “meet cute” takes place on the freeway. Actress Mia (Stone) works in a cute cafe on the Warners lot (they should open it for real) and has been on a grinding run of fruitless auditions; she’s “someone just waiting to be found,” as she puts it in a plaintive song. A skilled pianist, Sebastian (Gosling) is fed up with providing tinkling background music at bars and restaurants (J.K. Simmons fires him from one gig); he’s a jazz freak, loves Miles and swing bands, hangs at The Lighthouse down at the beach and is convinced that he’s “a phoenix rising from he ashes.” In other words, these two are like thousands of others in Hollywood, treading water but hoping to make it in spite of the odds.

Played out across the four seasons (albeit in different years), their romance begins bumpily. Seb, as he comes to be called, is downright rude to Mia at a springtime pool party, even though she could not look more splendid, quite like a brilliant sunflower, in a perfect yellow dress. Later, when he can no longer kid himself about his feelings for her, an enchanting musical sequence has them strolling and singing in the Hollywood Hills from one streetlamp to another back-dropped by a glorious vista.

In just one of countless aesthetic decisions that have gone into making the film the sophisticated confection that it is, many of the musical numbers have been shot at magic hour, which both softens and intensifies the colors, as well as the beauty and romanticism of the mostly real-world Los Angeles settings. The city has rarely looked this gorgeous in films, a credit to the director’s romantic imagination as well as to the technical expertise of Swedish cinematographer Linus Sandgren (American Hustle), who has superbly composed the film’s constant movement in the ultra-widescreen 2.52 x 1 aspect ratio.

Once they are a couple, things become, in a word, complicated. Realizing the long odds against Mia’s breaking through as an actress, Seb urges her to write something of her own to perform, which she buckles down to do. Paradoxically, he goes commercial, joining a successful band fronted by Keith (John Legend) that is constantly on tour, dictating long separations. A lengthy postscript, set five years later, features a fantasy dance sequence (a frequent motif of old musicals). But while aiming for poignance, the film loses some of its edge in this final stretch and arguably overstays its welcome by perhaps ten minutes; bringing the film in at under two hours would have been advisable.

All the same, for Chazelle to be able to pull this off the way he has is something close to remarkable. The director’s feel for a classic but, for all intents and purposes, discarded genre format is instinctive and intense; he really knows how to stage and frame dance and lyrical movement, to transition smoothly from conventional to musical scenes, to turn naturalistic settings into alluring fantasy backdrops for set pieces, and to breathe new life into what many would consider cobwebbed cliches.

The director shares his leading man’s preference for bygone styles, and it remains to be seen whether or not the charm and persuasiveness of the film’s look and performances are enough to disarm skeptical young audiences who have rarely, if ever, been exposed to the conventions Chazelle employs so enthusiastically and skillfully.

Happily, the two leads are clearly entirely in synch with his objectives. Sebastian has a certain gruff impatience and short temper born of creative frustration, but the concern and love he feels for Mia doesn’t take long to well up. Gosling may not be a trained dancer or musician, but his moves are appealingly his own and months of piano practice have given him convincing style on the keyboards.

Stone is simply a joy as the eternally aspiring actress it’s hard to believe is being passed over. Emotionally alive and able to shift gears on a dime, Stone is all the more convincing in this context as she has the kind of looks that would have been appealing in any era, particularly the 1930s and 1950s.

Many of the old Hollywood neighborhoods and establishments so selectively used here are meant to summon up meaningful movie memories: a date to see a revival screening of Rebel Without a Cause at the (defunct) Rialto Theater in Pasadena immediately segues into a visit to the planetarium at the Griffith Observatory, and one extended sequence makes the Warner Bros. backlot look busier than it probably ever has been since the 1930s.

All of Chazelle’s key collaborators were clearly in total synch with the project’s aims. Composer Justin Hurwitz, who worked on both the director’s previous films, has delivered an LP’s worth of buoyant, charming tunes, mostly in a jazzy vein, with Benj Pasek and Justin Paul supplying the lyrics. Production designer David Wasco and costume designer Mary Zophres adroitly supplied touches of the old and new in an elegant way, while choreographer Mandy Moore similarly danced a stylistic tightrope that greatly helped the director achieve his aim of delivering a welcome gift of vintage goods in a dazzling new package.

Source: Hollywood Reporter