Portside

First Man is a paean to American greatness. It does include a montage of protesters demanding that the money on NASA be spent to help the poor and hungry, set to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon”. That might have been a good title for the film.

La La Land is not, in the end, so very different from Whiplash (an earlier Chazelle film) for all their tonal differences. Above all, the vision they paint of the artistic life is masculine. In Damien Chazelle’s movies, men have power, and they get (almost) everything they want... And women? All they get to do is listen.