What happened when 4 boys discovered they absolutely loved La La Land

It doesn’t happen often. But when it does, it’s weirdly good.

La La Land has been the talk of the season. From Golden Globes to the Oscars, it has picked up loads of awards. It’s only normal that you want to watch the movie when there is so much talk about it in town. So I did catch the movie a couple of weeks back.

I was catching the movie online at home, alone. So I really did not have anyone to share my emotions with during the movie. And YES! I absolutely LOVED the movie. Now before you think why I liked it, there are many reasons (about which I will publish another blog)

Now when you love a movie so much, that too after a really long time, it’s natural for you to want to talk to someone about it. Luckily, I had about six friends who had all watched La La Land. I dropped a message on our Whatsapp group about how much I loved the movie.

I waited for a few minutes and got no response. I noticed that the message had been delivered to all six and read by four (things you do when you don’t get a response). Something did not seem right. I picked my phone and called the one person I thought would’ve surely loved the movie. Her response surprised and disappointed me.

She said it was “boring” and she “slept-off”. I was wondering for a moment if we had both watched the same La La Land. As I recovered from this “shock” and gathered myself to ask her why she felt so, her response was “Dude, it’s a musical. What do you expect? And everything was so slow that I was put to sleep”.

FML. She had actually watched the same movie and hated it. None of my other friends liked it either. There was a moment where I thought something was wrong with me but then I reminded myself of the love it had received worldwide — I sure am not alone. But the tough part was finding out who actually liked it. After the amount of negative reactions I got, I was really scared to even ask someone if they liked it. (“How can you like Laaa Laaa Land???” was the most common one)

Then this happened. I was at a friend’s party and there were about 40–50 of us. La La Land was the last thing on my mind as there were three bottles of tequila waiting to be downed. A couple of hours into the party, the people who managed to stand on their own foot started having conversations (of course, we finished the tequila!). While philosophy and life were favourite topics as usual, one guy spoke about La La Land. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

They were music to my ears and I am not even exaggerating here. He told me he absolutely loved the movie. We were joined by a couple of other folks who were in awe of the movie as well. The best part is, all of them were as excited as I was. It was like all of us had been looking for our “tribe” for quite sometime now and had finally found each other. All of us had been so disappointed at not finding anyone around us who loved this movie and this felt like a match made in heaven; ‘this was meant to be’ kind of feeling.

One of the guys did the unthinkable and created a Whatsapp group for the 4 of us. We hardly knew each other but the likelihood of meeting people like us was rare. There was a sense of hope that we will like more movies that the world around us doesn’t like. There was a need to be together, forever..forever.

Jokes apart, I loved the movie and the fact that I finally met people who liked it too. These things are not as magical when you look back at them (Whatsapp group, really?) but it’s really cool and quite memorable when it happens. That’s the thing about like-minded people — when you are surrounded by them, there is magic!