A Star Is Born (2018)

A Star Is Born (2018)

IMDB Rating : 9.3 (as on 02.09.2018)

R | 2h 15min | Drama, Music, Musical

A musician helps a young singer and actress find fame, even as age and alcoholism send his own career into a downward spiral.

Director: Bradley Cooper

Writers: Eric Roth (screenplay by), Bradley Cooper (screenplay by) 

Stars: Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper, Sam Elliott

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating : ★★★★★

Lady Gaga mesmerises in Streisand's shoes

Peter Bradshaw  

It’s the romantic epic of male sacrificial woundedness and it’s been regenerating like Doctor Who. We had it in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason and originally way back in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. It’s even been regenerating obliquely in movies such as The Artist and La La Land. Now Bradley Cooper plays the boozy and downwardly mobile alpha-star laying his pride on the showbiz altar of the woman he loves. Cooper directs and co-stars in this outrageously watchable and colossally enjoyable new version, supercharged with dilithium crystals of pure melodrama. He appears opposite a sensationally good Lady Gaga, whose ability to be part ordinary person, part extraterrestrial celebrity empress functions at the highest level at all times.

Here is the heart-wrenching gallantry of the grumpy, drunken singing star teetering over the apex of his fame, who discovers an unconventionally beautiful, talented young woman – single-handedly launching her on a glorious career while his own spirals downwards, redeeming his own former arrogance with this magnificently selfless act. He must accept the fate of being the embarrassing loser and has-been, finally not even allowed to be the wind beneath her wings.

Cooper takes his voice down a couple of octaves to play Jackson Maine, a gravel-toned MOR country-rocker doing stadium tours and keeping it together with huge amounts of booze and pills. He’s still a big success, but personally and emotionally he’s running on empty. (Cooper actually co-writes a few of his songs here, and his band is played by Neil Young’s longtime backing group: Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real.) He’s also suffering from encroaching deafness and tinnitus, which periodically bring him close to anxiety attacks and temper tantrums. He has to be shepherded by his manager and older brother, Bobby, played by Sam Elliott, for whom he has longstanding feelings of resentment, rivalry and guilt.

Cooper is arguably prettier than Lady Gaga, but she is the one who commands your attention: that sharp, quizzical, leonine, mesmeric face – an uningratiating face, very different from the wide-eyed openness of Streisand or Garland. (Weirdly, she rather more resembles Marta Heflin, playing the groupie-slash-interviewer who went to bed with Kristofferson in ’76.) Her songs are gorgeous and the ingenuous openness of her scenes with Jackson are wonderfully sympathetic. Meanwhile Cooper, whose screen persona can so often be bland and unchallenging, makes precisely this conservative tendency work for him in the role. He is so sad you want to hug him. Arguably, this film fudges some of Jackson’s dark side, by giving him partial deafness as well as alcoholism, but it is still a richly sympathetic spectacle.

For all that it’s hokum, this film alludes tactlessly to something pretty real. It could be called: A Star Is Dying. The new generation supplants the existing one. For one star to get an award, a handful of defeated nominees have to swallow their pain, as the spotlight moves away from them. For one star to deliver the shock of the new, another one has to receive the shock of the old. A Star Is Born turns that transaction into a love story.

Read complete review at The Guardian

Lady Gaga Delivers a Knockout Performance

STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

There’s only one antidote for the weird world we live in, an age of political anxiety, Instagram envy, humorless personal essays that treat basic life experiences like major tragedies, and selfies: We need more melodramas, movies that show human beings making all sorts of wrong choices, falling in love with people from whom they should run a mile, and in the end recovering lost bits of themselves, all while looking fabulous. Exaggeration is key—a tasteful, sensible melodrama is no melodrama at all—and you need a star who can radiate the nobility of suffering with Kabuki-level grandeur. Someone like Lady Gaga.

A Star Is Born, is just on the right side of tasteful, which is to say it’s slightly on the wrong side: It could stand to be more nutso in its expression of grand human emotions and dismal human failures. But it works anyway: You come away feeling something for these people, flawed individuals who are trying to hold their cracked pieces of self together—or to mend the cracks of those they love. Cooper plays charming but sozzled country star Jackson Maine, a guy who gets through each show—and every day—losing himself in booze. He’s losing his hearing, too, though he’s of course in denial about that, no matter how much his brother and ersatz caretaker, Bobby (Sam Elliott), tries to talk sense into him.

Enter Lady Gaga—the superstar who was born Stefani Germanotta, though the movie doesn’t credit her as such—as Ally, a restaurant worker who also sings and writes songs. After lurching through one of his own shows, Jackson sees her performing in a drag bar—the queens all love her, so they’re happy to have her onstage. In her tiny slip dress, with hyper theatrical eyebrows, like slender black parentheses, stuck over her own, she’s like an alien from Planet Song, shimmering her way through “La Vie en Rose.” If you’re looking for comparisons to Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland or Barbara Streisand, the other Star Is Born stars (this is the third or fourth remake, depending on whether or not you count George Cukor’s 1932 What Price Hollywood?), Gaga isn’t much like any of them: She’s more like Liza Minnelli, who channeled some of her mother’s fragility but tempered it with pluckiness. When Gaga’s Ally sings, she’s less a creature from over the rainbow than a sprite from another world who has quickly learned the ropes of our own fire and earth.

The big question that’s been hovering in the air for months is, Can Lady Gaga act? It’s a ridiculous question. Singers often make fabulous actors. They’re primed for it: All singing is acting. But what’s surprising about Gaga is how charismatic she is without her usual extreme stage makeup, outlandish wigs and inventive costumes. It’s such a pleasure to look at her face, unadorned, with that extraordinary, face-defining nose—it’s like discovering a new country. Later in the story, as Ally’s career takes off while Jackson’s fizzles, Gaga is less entrancing though no less likable: Ally connects with a manager who reshapes her image (Rafi Gavron), turning her from a fresh-faced singer-songwriter to a pop siren with hyper-red hair and increasingly theatrical clothes. This is where the movie loses a few puffs of steam. It’s hard not to miss Ally’s unadorned face and unflashy brown hair: You might find yourself wanting more Germanotta and less Gaga, Even so, Ally the superstar is still nowhere near as mythically outsized as Gaga herself is. In fact, as pop creations go, she’s rather average, though she certainly knows her way around a power ballad.

And she’s still the star of this whole show. As her co-star and director, Cooper shows an artistic generosity that’s almost courtly. The basic Star is Born story is geared so you pity the man almost more than you admire the woman. In every version, the man threatens to steal the show with his own degradation; the woman’s protective fortitude is far less interesting. But as an actor, Cooper fades into the corner at just the right moments, allowing Gaga to shine. He recognizes that as a performer, she’s larger than life; he’s just about life-sized, and there’s no shame in that. He also creates a suitable showcase for small but terrific performances from the likes of Dave Chappelle (as one of Jackson’s more sensible friends from the music world) and Andrew Dice Clay (as Ally’s limo-driving dad, Lorenzo).

Cooper makes some smart plot choices, too. (The screenplay is by Eric Roth, Cooper and Will Fetters.) Jackson’s demise is sensitively handled—nothing like Kris Kristofferson crashing his car just so Streisand can rush to the scene and cradle his lifeless head with sorrowful gusto. (Who thought that was a good idea?) And he keeps the filmmaking straightforward and unvarnished. It’s wonderful to see a first-time filmmaker who’s more interested in effective storytelling than in impressing us; telling a story effectively is hard enough. Best of all, Cooper has succeeded in making a terrific melodrama for the modern age. This is a story of big personalities and even bigger human mistakes. These days we’re always ready for our own close-ups. What a relief to turn the stage over to someone else for a change.

 Read complete review at Time.

Movie Rating : ★★★☆☆

An unnecessary remake

Geoffrey Macnab

Pop diva Lady Gaga gives a perfectly creditable performance opposite Bradley Cooper (who also directs) in the latest version of old Hollywood chestnut, A Star Is Born, but this still feels like an unnecessary remake.

It doesn’t add anything we haven’t already seen in the Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand versions. Worse, Cooper fails to harness Lady Gaga’s greatest quality as a performer, namely her flamboyance and outrageousness. Her character here is disappointingly conventional and even a little bland, a would-be singer in a dead-end job who keeps a picture of Carole King on her wall.

Ally (Gaga’s character) has a big nose and is very self-conscious about it. (“Almost every single person has told me they like the way I sound but they don’t like the way I look.” she laments early on. Her down to earth, Frank Sinatra-loving father (Andrew Dice Clay in Sopranos mode) is her biggest champion but nobody else other than her work colleague Noodles (Dave Chapelle) sees anything in her.

Then comes the evening when drunken country rock star Jackson Maine (Cooper) hears her perform "La Vie In Rose" in a drag bar. He is immediately smitten. Musically, this is Gaga’s high spot in the movie - the one song that allows her to move into the realm of high camp and to show a stage presence matching that of an Edith Piaf or a Marlene Dietrich.

Jackson takes pills backstage before concerts and consumes huge amounts of booze. Cooper plays him in a way which can’t help but rekindle memories of Kris Kristofferson (the male lead in the Streisand film.) He is charismatic but slowly falling to pieces.

His gruff voiced minder and brother Bobby (Sam Elliott) dutifully catches him when he falls, patches him up, cleans after him and makes sure he fulfils his contractual engagements.

Bradley Cooper’s portrayal of Jackson is on the sentimental side. The singer may be a self-destructive alcoholic who sometimes falls asleep in a drunken stupor but he always remembers to ask his limo driver how his family is getting on. Beneath the barnacles, he’s a decent, kind-hearted man. He sees Ally’s talent (“can I tell you a secret, I think you might be a songwriter”) and sets out to nurture it.

He invites her on stage, takes her on tour with him and they fall in love. He has advice for her on how to sustain a career. “If you don’t dig into your fucking soul, you won’t have legs.” His problem, though, is that he has dug too far into his soul and has destroyed himself in the process.

You don’t have to be an astrologer to predict that one star here will rise as the other falls. Ally may start from humble beginnings but she has the drive and the ambition. Jackson, meanwhile, is haunted by his very troubled childhood and his painful memories of his abusive father.

As a director, Cooper goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure authenticity. He looks and sounds like a fading country rock star from the 1960s or 1970s, belting out songs written by Lukas Nelson (Willy Nelson’s son) at huge concerts. The sound editing is exemplary.

This isn’t just a film about celebrity, ambition and destruction. It is also a love story. Cooper and Lady Gaga bring an impressive intimacy and tenderness to their scenes together. We know that at least one of them is heading fast toward the reefs. The supporting characters, notably the ruthless promoter and producer Rez (Raf Gavron), are drawn in superficial fashion.

If you’re looking for an original and surprising variation on A Star Is Born, you’d be better advised to turn to Michel Hazanavicius’ silent film The Artist, than to this downbeat and surprisingly lugubrious version. Cooper and his team simply aren’t able to reinvigorate material that has been pored over so many times before by other filmmakers.

The star wattage of Cooper and Lady Gaga and their soulful, heartfelt performances aren’t enough to light up a movie that, for all its qualities, is bound to earn unfavourable comparison with its predecessors.

 Read  complete review at  Independent

There's a lot to love in Bradley Cooper's entertaining remake of A Star is Born, including his convincing portrayal of a hard-drinking country rocker in some electrifying concert scenes, and the captivating debut in a big-screen leading role of Lady Gaga as the singer-songwriter whose career he launches, only to watch it quickly eclipse his own. The first-time director's grasp of pacing could be improved and the overlong movie can't quite sustain the energy and charm of its sensational start. But this is a durable tale of romance, heady fame and crushing tragedy, retold for a new generation with heart and grit.

Development of the remake dates back to 2011, with Clint Eastwood initially attached to direct Beyonce in the ascending star role and various big names approached to co-star. Cooper turns out to be a good fit, with an efficient, straightforward handle on directing duties and an actor's well honed instinct for intimate character shading and interaction. His natural charisma also enables him to soften the self-destructive edges of veteran musician Jackson Maine, locating the resilient humanity that celebrity, personal demons and alcohol and drug abuse haven't been able to crush. There's real warmth and a sexy spark in his onscreen chemistry with Gaga that makes their characters' instant connection believable.

Those establishing scenes are among the movie's best, particularly since Gaga completely sheds her pop persona and exhibits a scrubbed-clean, relaxed appeal and a deft balance of toughness and vulnerability as Ally, a struggling musician working as a waitress. Those qualities spare the movie from falling into the vanity-project trap of the last remake, the engorged 1976 version with Barbra Streisand that shifted the story from Hollywood to the music industry and provides the bones for this iteration. Cooper does bear similarities here to Streisand's co-star Kris Kristofferson, though he tones down the corrosive bitterness.

Some of the concert scenes were filmed at music festivals like Coachella, and there's a surge of excitement as Cooper's Jackson (Jack to his friends) crunches power chords on his guitar before a pumped-up arena crowd, launching into one of a handful of songs built around the theme of yearning for change. Slugging down whiskey in the back of his car after the show, he asks his driver to pull over at a random bar where it turns out to be drag night.

In a lovely nod to Gaga's status as a queer icon, Ally, who used to wait tables at the joint, has a guest spot among the lip-synching glamazons. She belts out a powerhouse rendition of "La Vie en Rose," making eye contact with Jack while doing some supine vamping on the bar. Encouraged by Ally's bosom buddy Ramon (Anthony Ramos from the original Hamilton cast), Jack hangs around after the show, sweetly smashed and affably mingling with the resident drag queens. There are echoes of what the movie does in terms of exploring a new side of Gaga when Jack peels off one of Ally's fake eyebrows, asking to see the real woman beneath the stage camouflage.

As their evening continues together, he learns that negative perceptions about her looks have inhibited her from performing her own material, while she discovers a melancholy man quietly hungering for something more. He makes her head spin by sending a car and private plane to bring her to his next concert and then hauls her out on stage with no warning to perform one of her songs as a duet. It's sheer fantasy that she would be so performance-ready, but hey, it's a movie. The soulful strength in Ally's vocals makes her a fine match for Jackson, and also makes it conceivable that his fans would respond so enthusiastically to her.

The quick progression into love, cohabitation and marriage is briskly handled, the latter as a spontaneous decision while Jack is coming off a bender at the Memphis home of his old buddy Noodles (Dave Chappelle), a musician content to have traded life on the road for the stability of a loving family. There's freshness in the pared-back narrative shorthand of these scenes, as there is in Ally's navigation of Jack's excesses, on one hand giving him his space while on the other letting him know she won't keep following him down his dark spiral. His issues are worsened by an acrimonious split from his much older half-brother and manager, Bobby (Sam Elliott, bringing his customary weathered integrity), and by the deterioration of a longtime hearing impairment.

Where the movie becomes more pedestrian is in Ally's conquest of superstardom. It's a big disappointment that she trades her authenticity to become, well, an ersatz Lady Gaga. Groomed by aggressive British starmaker Rez (Rafi Gavron), she gets a flashy image makeover with brassy red hair, a hotter wardrobe and a team of backup dancers. Paradoxically, it makes the character less attractive.

The transformation is complete when she lands a guest spot on Saturday Night Live (Alec Baldwin cameos as host), performing a risibly bad piece of processed pop that erases any trace of her individuality. While Jackson accurately describes it as an embarrassment in a heated argument, Ally never shows much resistance beyond going rogue and nixing the dancers in a concert gig. Later, the self-serving Rez becomes more manipulative about minimizing the collateral damage on her career of Jackson's sobriety lapses. But there's a hole in the movie where Rez's comeuppance, or at the very least a confrontation with Ally, should be.

There's a potentially rich subtext here about the constricting ways in which women are packaged for success in the music industry and the narrow reality of what sells in contemporary pop. But the script by Eric Roth, Cooper and Will Fetters declines to explore that path, representing a missed opportunity. Aside from one drunken outburst and inevitable flickers of jealousy as his own gigs become more thankless, Jack is mostly supportive of Ally's career. But he urges her to dig deep into her soul if she wants to have staying power.

The arc that carries the drama through humiliation, atonement, tragedy, heartbreak and a final, very public reaffirmation of Ally's love for Jackson is pretty much indestructible, even if some dawdling in the mid-to-late action softens the emotional impact. It's in the closing scene also that Gaga's skill as an actor isn't at the level of her impeccable vocals. But while this is not going to replace either the 1937 Janet Gaynor-Fredric March original or especially the beloved 1954 Judy Garland-James Mason remake as the classic version, Cooper's fresh take finds plenty of mileage left in the well-trod showbiz saga. There are flavorful enhancements also in scenes with Andrew Dice Clay as Ally's dad, a limo service driver with his own deferred dreams of stardom as a wannabe Sinatra.

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique, who brings such a rich look to his work with Darren Aronofsky, shoots in high-gloss or darker textures as required, excelling in particular in the dynamic performance sequences. Production designer Karen Murphy and costumer Erin Benach make vital contributions to defining milieu and character. But the most invaluable element is the music, covering a diverse range of frequently catchy songs, co-written by Cooper and Gaga with artists including Lukas Nelson, Jason Isbell and Mark Ronson. (Nelson and his group Promise of the Real appear as Jack's band.) Cooper does his own singing with the same unshowy confidence he brings to everything else.

 Read complete review at Hollywood Reporter