A Star is Born--2018

Bradley Cooper's A Star is Born is a beautiful movie. I saw it this past Thursday evening, and it has stayed with me since then. Besides being a beautiful movie, it is a moving one--a love story that reaches in, grabs your heart, and doesn't let go. I haven't felt this way about a film since Brokeback Mountain from 2005. A Star is Born has gotten excellent reviews all the way around, and that is not surprising. I was thinking about why the film works so well; after all, this is the fourth remake of the original film from 1937. I haven't seen the original film or the other remakes, but I feel sure that this film, apart from the original, is the best. I think it comes down to the two leads, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. Both play vulnerable characters who open up to each other and who fall in love. Both are singers, one on the way up (Ally, played by Lady Gaga) and one on the way down (Jackson Maine, played by Bradley Cooper). Jackson Maine is struggling with alcoholism and drug addiction; his career as a country singer has peaked and he knows it. When he begins to sing together with Ally after 'discovering' her in a drag bar where she performs at times, he understands that she is what he needs, both professionally and personally. But other people recognize her talent and do not want him and his addictions to stand in her way, with a tragic outcome. It's a story that's been told many times in many different ways, but this one works. It's been brought up-to-date, with Ally being able to move between a number of different song genres, from country music to pop.

In my opinion the film works because the chemistry between Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga is real, raw, palpable. You feel it every time they look at each other, hug each other, or touch each other. You feel that they care for each other, and you feel for them when their relationship falls on hard times. Their chemistry has been commented upon by many movie reviewers and the stars themselves. The movie is filmed in an intimate manner, with close-ups of their faces and expressions, which creates the effect that we are right there with them. There is a vulnerability and an ease between them that works; there is nothing slick or superficial about their relationship. I found myself thinking that this is the way many romantic relationships start, with that vulnerability and ease. They are beautiful things if you are lucky enough in your life to experience them; they are what we are always seeking a return to, and if we are lucky enough, we find them again and fall in love with our partner all over again.

But it occurred to me as well that both Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga experienced that vulnerability in their real lives when making this film, not just in their characters' lives onscreen. Cooper is an actor, not a singer (or director--this is his first time as director), and Lady Gaga is a singer, not an actor; yet both of them moved out of their 'safe' zones to try something new, with amazing results. Cooper can sing, and Lady Gaga can act. Additionally, Lady Gaga knows what it takes to reach the top, and I feel sure that she drew on those experiences and used them in creating Ally. The performances of the other actors in this film are also worth lauding--Sam Elliot as Jackson's brother Bobby, and Andrew Dice Clay as Lorenzo Campana, Ally's father.

Cooper and Lady Gaga supported each other and brought out the best in each other, and created a film that will last, that will still move you half a century from now. That is an amazing feat and one to be proud of--to know as the director, and as actors, that you have created a film that is already assured a place in posterity.

Life in a fishbowl

Been thinking a bit about the whole celebrity worship thing and the role of the media in magnifying news stories of celebrity happenings. I know it’s all been around for quite a while, but the intensity of the insanity didn’t really distress me until the recent report that Kristen Stewart had cheated on her Twilight and real-life boyfriend Robert Pattinson with Snow White and the Huntsman movie director Rupert Sanders. Ok, so I know the names of all involved. It’s impossible not to know that information these days. Everywhere you turn, there was the same story. The story ‘broke’ in the media in a manner reserved for invasions of countries by aggressors and the start of world wars. All hell broke loose. You would have thought someone famous had died—a statesman, the pope, a president. God only knows. I didn’t watch the major TV news channels that day but I shudder to think of the news coverage of this trite infidelity story. Of course we all know it didn’t deserve this amount of news coverage, but heck, infidelity sells newspapers, magazines, and gets people to watch the TV news. It gets fans to spread the story on Facebook, on Twitter, and all other social media avenues available. I couldn’t believe how fans took the news. You would have thought Bella and Edward from Twilight were real people with a real life. But alas, they are not. Fans should try to understand the difference--Kristen is not Bella, Robert is not Edward. Fans may want them to be, but they are not. Their movie marriage was not real; they were not married to each other in real life. Rupert Sanders is a married man with children. It just points out yet again that the celebrities worshipped by society are just regular people who blunder along and fail like the rest of us, but who do so in a fishbowl unlike anything we could possibly imagine. There has always been celebrity worship (think about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and their affair during the filming of Cleopatra), but the coverage was more restricted at that time. It’s another world now. It’s all been written about before, analyzed to death, and talked about ad nauseum—that the celebrity hounding and worship have got to stop, but they continue. They continue because the profit motive remains the goal. But as a society, we have shifted off balance, toward a world that cannot sate itself; there will never be enough news that’s fit to print about any celebrity or film star. The fixation on dissecting celebrities and film stars into minute atoms and to report the results of these dissections—that will continue to snowball. I sense desperation now where before there was just excessive curiosity. What is the natural end of desperation?

Scrap bag of ticket stubs

I save my ticket stubs from the different concerts, plays, ballets and films I attend during each year. I started doing that when my husband and I moved to San Francisco in 1993; there were so many interesting things to see and do and it became a way for me to remember all of the places we in fact visited during our year there. I would venture to say that I have a ‘scrapbook’ of ticket stubs. They are however not organized in a book, but rather are stored in a plastic baggie. Let’s call it a scrap bag. Believe it or not, I do dig into it from time to time. I recently got a question from two friends who could not remember if we had been to the cinema together during 2010 (in fact none of us could remember doing so, but we did remember talking about doing so, and then we got confused and wondered if we did in fact end up at the cinema). I consulted my scrap-bag to find out. I quickly found out that I have seen a number of films during the past year (but none of them with these two friends): Black Swan; Hereafter; Another Year; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—part 1; Red; You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger; The Ghost Writer; Alice in Wonderland; Shutter Island; It’s Complicated; Fantastic Mr. Fox; Where the Wild Things Are; Sherlock Holmes. This does not include the films I have seen on our cable TV channels—more recent films that I never got a chance to see when they were playing in the theaters.

I started keeping track of all the films I have seen when I was a teenager. I think the first film I ever saw (sneaked in to see) was Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy from 1972. I was hooked after that experience, and started to write down all the films I had seen. By the time I was twenty I think I had seen close to four hundred movies. I stopped writing them down after that, and I didn’t save ticket stubs either at that time. Going to the movies was just what you did when we were young—out with friends, on a date, and so on. There was no cable TV, no Netflix, or video/DVD rental stores to supply us with films on demand. So you went to the movies when they came out because that was your chance to see those films. I read Vincent Canby’s movie reviews in The New York Times religiously; he was a terrific and provocative movie reviewer. You just knew he loved the movie world. According to Wikipedia, he ‘became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there’. What a wonderful job that must have been, and what a job in and of itself. Think about it, at the time he started reviewing movies there was no Internet, no Google--no information at your fingertips. If he needed to check on any facts, he had to spend a lot of time searching for them or tracking them down. If I want to find information on an actor or a film or a TV show, I go to my favorite movie website—Internet Movie Database www.imdb.com. It is a mecca for movie lovers. I can surf there for hours. But the point is that I find what I’m looking for within a few minutes.

Charles Bronson was one of my favorite actors from that time in my life—the actor of Death Wish fame, but also of The Mechanic and Mr. Majestyk. And does anyone remember Jan Michael Vincent (The Mechanic, Buster and Billie, White Line Fever)? He was popular with us too. Richard Thomas of the Waltons fame has a horror film to his credit (e.g. You’ll Like My Mother). The actress Sian Barbara Allen was also popular (with me at least)—she starred with Richard Thomas in You’ll Like My Mother and ended up as his love interest on The Waltons; they apparently were romantically involved at that time. It was somehow thrilling to even come across that little tidbit of information in a teen fan magazine of one sort or another—some gossip from the movie world. Now it seems as though the world revels in every nano-particle of information they can get about celebrities. We’ve gone from a scarcity of information to information overload. But I’ll take the latter as long as I can sort through what is useful. I love the fact that any and all movie information is available at my fingertips these days. But I still need my ticket stubs to remind me that I was actually there in the theater watching the films. 

Talking about the hereafter

It is not often that society talks about what happens after death in any meaningful way. That topic is mostly left over to different religions to tackle, and is frowned upon in more pragmatic westernized cultures, like the one I live in at present. There is very little discussion at all concerning personal faith and beliefs about life or death. They are mostly ignored. Of course, the fascination with death as a process exists. There is no dearth of films or TV shows showing the deaths of one or many persons, the different modes of death, the fear of death and so on. Witness the popularity of TV series like CSI that dwell on the realistic aspects of deaths and autopsies and the science surrounding them. The goal of series like these is to get people to understand that science can help in crime-solving, and that is a good thing. But any real discussion (or attempt at one) of what happens to a person after death is almost taboo. So that the recent Hollywood film Hereafter is a welcome exception. It surprises me that it was made at all, and I’m guessing the only reason it was made was because Clint Eastwood directed it (he did not write it). I really enjoyed the film. It’s not a great film but it’s a very good film about very difficult subject matter. A few minutes into the movie, we are witness to a horrific tsunami that sweeps in over a vacation paradise, crushing much of what is in its path and taking many people with it. One of those people is a young French woman (Marie, beautifully played by Cecile de France) who apparently drowns and then is brought back to life by two men who rescue her. While she drowns she experiences visions of the hereafter, where she sees a world of shadow people (silhouettes) all walking toward her bathed in a kind of white light. She cannot let go of that vision and decides to find out more about it. Most of the people in her life—her boyfriend/boss, her colleagues—are cautiously supportive but ultimately move away from her, except for one man who puts her in touch with two potential publishers for the book she wants to write about after-death experiences. Her story is one of three in the film. The other one is about a real psychic (George, played by Matt Damon) who can contact the dead, who has retreated from that world in favor of a factory job that helps keep his mind off death. His story is poignant because you are witness to how his life can never be normal once people find out what he can do. They want to talk to their departed family members and friends, but when they find out what the dead are saying to them, they are disturbed enough by it so that it is not hard to understand why the psychic ends up mostly alone, with no friends and no girlfriend. The film does a good job of showing how many people view this kind of contact with the dead as a game. It is not hard to understand that either since most of what pass for psychics are probably fakers. The third story is about a young boy whose twin brother is killed by a car and how he wants to find a way to contact him. All three of these characters end up at a book fair in London—a kind of synchronicity of events that allows them to meet each other. The film is slow-moving, so that by the time you get to this point it is possible that some people have lost their attention span. But the film has to be slow-moving in order to build up credibility. We have to see that the psychic‘s gift is a real gift, that he suffers because he has that gift, that it results in his living a lonely life, and that his attempts to change his life are mostly half-hearted. He mostly always gives in to people who want him to help them, even though he has stopped contacting the dead as a job. I don’t know if I would call Hereafter a dark film as much as a searching one. All three characters are in search of clarity and hope. The psychic knows that the hereafter exists (he doesn’t question its existence) because he can talk for the dead, but he wants to live his life and not focus on death, the young woman is searching for answers to what happens after death because she had previously only focused on her successful earthly life and she has understood how fragile it is, and the little boy wants to talk to his brother who was his companion in life because his brother supported and protected him. The film doesn’t really provide any answers—how could it—since no one has come back from the hereafter to tell us what it is like. But it opens doors to thinking and talking about it and that is a good thing, even though there are no real answers. Perhaps there is some comfort in just talking about it at times. Talking about it doesn’t have to mean focusing on it obsessively. The message ultimately is that it is this life we are given and that we should live it and have hope, and that is what Marie and George find out at the end of the film. He changes his life by taking a definitive stance to not do any more readings, and he leaves California for a European vacation that starts in London. His path in London leads him to Marie, and by the end of the film you know that these two will somehow get together. Is it a Hollywood ending? Perhaps. In any case, it was an acceptable ending for this film (at least for me) because the characters had decided to focus on life and not on death. Perhaps because they no longer feared death, they could focus on life. But the film in no way diminishes their journeys, and that is one of the things I liked about it. It didn’t scoff or poke fun at their questionings and beliefs. I know that the film’s theme will either attract or push people away, and I’m guessing that is the reason that the reviewers are as divided as they are about the film. Nevertheless, I give Clint Eastwood credit for taking on the film, since the topic is not a simple one and opens the door to skepticism and rejection purely because of the theme alone.    

'Quiet desperation'

I wanted to really really like the movie Another Year, directed by Mike Leigh. After seeing it last night, I ended up somewhat liking it. Loving it? No. In fact, I ended up a bit irritated—I’m not sure at what. Myself for sitting through it? The theme? The passivity in the film? The depressing aspects in the film? The real-life aspects? The ending? There are so many things I could find fault with. I wonder if I expected something different. The acting was superb. But I guess I wanted something more than I got. I felt a bit cheated at the end, because we’re asked to care about characters about whom we’ve learned very little.

To paraphrase Pink Floyd, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” from their song Time may actually be the clue to my feelings of irritation. The film is decidedly British from start to finish, and that is usually fine with me, as I am a real anglophile when it comes to most British film and TV dramas—such as the Jane Austen, Charlotte (and Emily) Bronte, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy tales made into films and series. It’s just that in this particular case, I felt like screaming a few times during the film and at the end—“do something”. I wanted some life to be injected into an otherwise rather dreary daily existence (non-life) for many of the characters. They mostly did nothing—lived life in the same way as they had done for years, passively waiting for life to change instead of trying to change it actively. This may be how some British people (and other people in other lands) live, but I am not sure it is how all of them live. I have read so many reviews of the film that talk about how blissfully-married Gerri and Tom are, and to be sure, their relationship is nice. They respect each other and are kind to each other after many years of marriage, but I found their relationship to be somewhat superficial. Perhaps that is what happens after so many years of marriage, but I never got the feeling that they were passionate about anything. They did what they needed to do but there was no real excess of feeling, either toward each other or toward their friends. There were a couple of instances when Gerri offers silent comfort to one or two friends, but otherwise I felt that Gerri and Tom kept their emotional distance. Emotional distance, or a kind of remoteness from the world around them, or efficient emotionality (just enough but no more) seemed to be the secret to their happiness. If this is true, it’s rather interesting, but nothing was made of this or of much else. As it was, so much in the film was understated, and that may be the British way. The presentation of the lives of their single friends was an exercise in slow torture. Mary and Ken (who was interested in Mary who rebuffed him) are single middle-agers who seem to have found no meaning in life whatsoever. Mary has a crush on Joe, Gerri and Tom’s son, who ends up with a girlfriend (Katie) by the time autumn comes and this sends Mary into a downward spiral. While the actors did an excellent job at portraying such lives on film, it was the most depressing depiction of single life I have seen up to now. Nothing in Mary or Ken’s lives seemed to work. They were unhappy, miserable, emotional vampires (especially Mary) who sucked the life out of most of the people with whom they came into contact. Perhaps there was some hope for Ken, I thought, since he seemed to be more jovial, but no, he was apparently close to being suicidal. If I was a single person and saw these types of portrayals, I’d be pissed as hell. I’d wonder, my God, is this how the world sees single middle-aged people—as a sorry lot of folk who are just desperate for happiness and meaning? Is that the only thing that gives their lives meaning—desperation for love and acceptance? What about their jobs? What about participating in charity work? There was nothing. While I know that some single people suffer from loneliness after many years of living alone, I know others who have made a lot of their lives. It is so unfair to peg singles in this way. I would have liked to have seen a middle-aged single person in this film that was happy, or if not happy, at least content with life. They do exist. It would have balanced out the misery. Tom’s brother Ronnie, newly-bereaved, was another silent stone-like personality. He didn’t seem to like his deceased wife very much, and he had no relationship whatsoever with his son Carl. Yet this is presented as though there is something very much wrong with Carl (who is a quite angry individual), when in fact this is the first time in the movie that there is any real life at all. I was interested to know why Carl was angry. How had he grown up? Did he have a good relationship with his mother? Why was his relationship with his father so awful? But none of these questions gets answered, and they are the interesting questions. It’s as though Mike Leigh is saying that in order to survive in this life and be happy, you have to dampen your feelings and your passion and live totally on an even keel. That would be impossible for most people I know. And if you do all this, you achieve balance and harmony, yes, but do you really know the people around you, the people with whom you are living? No wonder Carl was angry. There didn’t seem to be much honesty. And perhaps that is what I was looking for. Why couldn’t Gerri have said to Mary that she was hurt by her behavior toward Katie and Joe? Why did she save it all up for months at a time? Real friends would have talked it over. As it was, they were not real friends. So these are the things that stick in my mind. I guess you could say the film made an impression on me, but I think I would have been fine not having seen it. It did not really add any new insights to my life. And that is what I am looking for when I go to films like these.