Quick Thoughts: A Star Is Born

Sally and I went to see A Star Is Born last night, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in which Cooper is himself making his directorial debut.  I liked the movie a lot, but I had some thoughts about it, too.

Detailed spoilers are below.  Click through at your own risk.

I've been a Gaga fan for a while now.  Musically, I like her more recent, stripped down stuff more than I like some of the older, more pop-focused stuff, but I still turn it up even when something like "Paparazzi" comes on.  More than that, though, I appreciate Gaga as a performance artist.  She's a musician, but she's also very much a visual artist who uses her personal appearance as an artistic medium in often compelling ways.

Quoting myself from December 9, 2013, shortly after "Applause" came out: 

"My reading on the Gaga video is that it's a parody. She's showing the insane lengths to which she's willing to go in order to get your attention because she's addicted to fame. That's why she spends all that time in the black suit; to make the contrast with the rest, so that we'll realize how ridiculous it all is... I've watched it a couple of times, [and] I think it's really clever."

Bottom line, I was primed and ready to like this movie.  It's a movie about a star whose talents I already appreciated.

Besides the music, my favorite thing about the movie is the way that Cooper keeps the focus so tightly on the stars when they're on stage.  He's not showing us concert clips.  He's trying to give us a sense of what it's like to be up there, to be them.  The unreality of those moments.  These two are both basically monster theater nerds, and even at his lowest, Cooper's Jack is still all about the music.  He says it over and over again (to paraphrase): "Now's your chance if you have something to say."  They both drink, at least in part, to get more comfortable in front of people, and it's long since become a problem for Jack before we even meet him.  All of that rang true for me.

But it's also what makes the ending so nihilistic.  Jack doesn't want to stand in Ally's way.  He believes her manager when dude says that Jack is dragging her down, and in the end, Jack makes what I think we're supposed to believe is a nobly-intended sacrifice.  He puts her career and her success ahead of not only his own happiness but also his actual life.  Because he can't live without her.  But he's dragging her down, too.

But he also makes that choice for her, and that's where I got hung up.  He puts her career and her music ahead of his own happiness and his own life, okay.  I think it's wrong, but it's his life.  But he also puts her music and her career ahead of her happiness, and folks, that's not his choice to make.  She's ready to power down, to put their lives ahead of their careers for once, and that's actually a good thing.  It's not like they're gonna starve.  More to the point, the music's not going anywhere.  They could've spent all summer writing songs.  Probably that's exactly what would've happened, given these two and their idea of a good time.

Jack undersells himself badly as a music writer.  I mean, I get that people in the throws of alcoholic depression don't always make good choices--I've lived that a time or two myself--but it hurt to watch it.  It was not cool in an otherwise fun and mostly upbeat movie to see a guy kill himself in the throws of what should be personal joy and victory.  I didn't see it coming, and it was so downbeat and confusing...  Alas, I guess that's real life, too, in many ways.

Seriously, though, Jack wrote or arranged half or even most of Ally's songs.  We get that Ally is a talented songwriter, but... so is Jack!  

Don't break up the team, Jack.

Argh.

There is, of course, no talking to a person after they've reached a certain point.  And besides that, Jack's not even a real person.  But man, I did not like that ending, even though I very much want to buy the movie's soundtrack.  In my head, when I listen to it, it'll end differently.  And today, I will purposefully spend the day with my family, rejecting darkness and loneliness, because there's just way too much of that stuff in the world.

Bradley Cooper reportedly ‘miserable’ with model girlfriend after bonding with Lady Gaga (Mercury News)

“A Star is Born” certainly turned out to be a labor of love for the first-time director. A lot of that had to do with finding his ideal co-star, Cooper has said. Cooper called Lady Gaga “a revelation” and said in interviews he couldn’t have made the movie without her.

“I think the biggest thing I learned is that sky’s the limit if you find a companion artistically, and you have a project,” he said, according to New York magazine’s The Cut. “There is no dreaming too big. What people can do together is so much more powerful than what they can do by themselves.”

I thought this was just a sad but kind of funny story until I read that Cooper and his girlfriend have a child together.


Lady Gaga Says She Dyed Her Hair Back to Blonde the Night She Finished Shooting A Star Is Born (People)

“I literally dyed my hair blonde the night that we stopped shooting because I wanted to get out of it as soon as possible because there is — without giving away the end of the film — there is some tremendous emotion and tragedy, so I wanted to get her out, but to be honest, she’s still in here,” Gaga recalled as she pointed to her heart.