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Is 'A Star Is Born' Great American Mythmaking Or Cliched Trash? A Debate.

Two people—one who hated the movie and one who loved it—trudge through the shallows of a divisive film.
An actual photo of the authors of this piece when they finally settled on a review of
WARNER BROS.
An actual photo of the authors of this piece when they finally settled on a review of

You probably formed an opinion about “A Star Is Born” long before the movie came out. Maybe you were smitten by the remake’s trailer, in which Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga duet in a most epic fashion. Maybe you watched Gaga glide into the Venice Film Festival on a damn yacht or heard the rumor this film would make you feel again.

But be warned, how you felt walking into the theater says nothing about how you’ll feel leaving it.

Despite its relatively straightforward plot ― a tortured male rock star meets an unknown but massively talented female singer, setting off a sequence of events that lead to the downturn of the former’s career and the cosmic ascendance of the latter’s ― “ASIB” is a divisive film. Maybe it’s not a groundbreaking movie, but it’s a ground-quaking one in that its simplest aspects still beg you to overthink them. Since its first screenings this summer, the film has prompted a deluge of polarized reactions andinterpretations.

So critics Zeba Blay and Priscilla Frank (a lover and a hater of the film, respectively) felt compelled to sit down and hammer out the film’s thorniest puzzles. Is the romance meant to be campy? Did the story unfairly characterize pop music as less than rock? Was Cooper’s dog believable? Together, they decide once and for all if this buzzworthy movie is worth your $16.25.

Warning: Spoilers below!

Priscilla Frank: So Zeba, hi! Before seeing “ASIB,” you wrote a spot-on ode to its “perfect” (and very meme-able) trailer. Do you feel the movie lived up to the commercial for it?

Zeba Blay: Nope, nope, not really. Ha-ha. The trailer, like I guess all trailers are, really was a distillation of everything great about the movie. Like, all the camp of the trailer kind of goes out the window when you watch the movie, which is fine, but it was definitely jarring. I enjoyed the movie but definitely not in the way that I thought I would. It was a pretty somber affair.

PF: From the trailer, I expected a juicy, over-the-top melodrama, a la “Titanic.” (Do I always hope every movie will be like “Titanic”? Perhaps.) But the movie took itself so seriously, it sapped a lot of the pleasure out of the experience for me as a viewer. I felt like I was watching Bradley Cooper’s Very Serious Auteur Man Director Debut.

I must also note that a very RUDE man was returning from the bathroom at the exact moment Gaga’s “HAAAAAAAA AH AH AH AHHHHH AHHHHHH HAAA AHH HAAA” bit and he blocked my view, throwing me into a blind rage that probably stayed with me until the end of the film. That may sound irrelevant, but I think theater audience vibes really affect how people feel about this movie. Like in my audience, no one was excited for the “I just wanted to take another look at you” moment. I could imagine, if people were cheering and laughing at the line, getting into it. What was your crowd like?

ZB: My audience was DEAD SILENT. It was eerie AF. I kept looking around making sure people hadn’t, like, just walked out. Incidentally, my friend who I was with walked out for about five minutes halfway through the film because it was stressing her out. Which I think pretty much sums it up ― this is a very stressful movie. Some great moments, some amazing singing, but overall stressful as fuck. I kinda liked how stressful it was, though, but then maybe that’s because I live in a constant state of anxiety anyway, so it felt cozy and familiar?

On a scale of HAAAAAAAA AH AH AH AHHHHH AHHHHHH HAAA AHH HAAAs,how stressed were you watching this?

PF: I would say I was feeling very AAAAHHHHH!!! just because I wanted to love this movie so badly and I didn’t at all. Maybe I was too hopped up on all the hype. But when I realized I was not into it, then started actively hating it, I felt agitated by the whole situation. (I was in Times Square on a Sunday, so I had given up A LOT to be there.)

The first time I batted an eye was when Ally punched that stranger in the bar because he politely asked Jack for a photo. It seemed so implausible that she would lash out like that over something so minor. The rest of the film paints her character as so caring and level-headed, so it felt like an unrealistic reach to suddenly say she’s not like other girls or something. I think over-the-top expositiony moments like that can work if the film has a campy or melodramatic tone, but this movie, I think, took itself too seriously to pull silly stunts like that and get away with it.

I very much enjoyed the internet debate of whether the movie is campy, but after seeing it, I perceived no camp whatsoever. Where do you fall on the camp/no camp debate?

ZB: Yeah, there’s no camp. Unless Gaga is singing. I think the movie does this really interesting thing of toeing the line between corny, mainstream Oscar bait and that artsy indie aesthetic with the shaky cam and improvised lines. I kinda liked that aspect of it. It’s just a very weird movie. For me, so many things about it didn’t work, but what DID work was Lady Gaga, who kind of held up the film with her earnestness and her star power even when it started to kind of lose me.

And I’m just gonna say it and get this out of the way: I’ve never found Cooper particularly attractive, but he was fine AF in this movie. There. I said it.

Was there any part in the film that you really loved? That quelled the rage for a bit?

Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper
Mike Marsland via Getty Images
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper

PF: I agree, Cooper normally doesn’t do it for me, but I would let Jackson Maine rub a baked good in my face any day. His gravelly voice teetered between that of a sexy cowboy dying of thirst and an incomprehensible garbage disposal, but his charm magnet was very effective.

I did love parts of the movie. Any time Gaga sang was magnificent. Her chemistry with Cooper was sparkly and sexy, especially at the beginning. Andrew Dice Clay as Daddy Gaga was delightful. Oh, and Gaga’s orange hair made me want to buy Manic Panic pronto!

There were definitely good moments, but all in all, I felt I was watching a never-ending montage of played-out rise-and-fall-of-musician tropes that didn’t grab me emotionally. (Am I a monster?!) I just felt the lead characters were ultimately cardboard cutouts of music cliches without any nuance or originality. And the depiction of life as a contemporary pop star wasn’t at all as outrageous or opulent as I wanted it to be. (Her costumes and dance moves were very meh.)

I guess my question is, actually, am I a monster? I feel like I’m the only person I know who didn’t love this movie. I normally cry at almost any vaguely sentimental movie, TV show or commercial, so I was shocked when I felt nothing at the end. Did you feel emotionally wrecked?

ZB: I wouldn’t say I felt emotionally wrecked, but I definitely felt emotional and reflective. And yes, I cried. The movie wasn’t necessarily as camp as I expected, and so those moments of rawness hit me in a much more visceral way. I think there’s something to be said for movies that run on pure emotion or melodrama without being camp. Like, the film was incredibly earnest in its depictions of love, betrayal and addiction. There wasn’t an ounce of cynicism in the movie, which surprised me.

I think it’s tough to do justice to stories of addiction on screen that don’t feel exploitative or just plain unrealistic. I know there has been some criticism of how the movie handles addiction, but for me, I think there was this certain underlying quality of watching not only Jackson Maine but Cooper, the actor, reckon with his own addiction and sobriety. This movie is so overblown in some ways but then in others so deeply personal, and I think that’s what made the not-so-great parts of it sort of recede for me. What did you think?