A new version of A Star is Born is out soon, so I decided to start the week off by watching the three previous versions and comparing them a little. I also watched Venom, which wasn't good, but competent enough for me to get over my personal bias and lower my opinion of The Predator further. As always, if you need to brush up on the plot of something I watched, follow the IMDb link in the title(s).
273. A Star Is Born (1937) - October 1st
- 7.5/10
274. A Star Is Born (1954) - October 2nd
- 8/10
275. A Star Is Born (1976) - October 3rd
- 5/10
Rather than trying to awkwardly segue between the three individual discussions, I'll just give you my ratings of all three up front, because despite the merits of each film what I found most interesting was the changes made between them in terms of style and structure. Each film feels like a product of its time and means of production, and I think it's kind of neat to see how the three films differ.
As a quick primer, all three films follow a woman with aspirations of stardom who gets a chance through an older once-celebrity now fading out of the limelight.
The original has its focus squarely on its lead, Esther, with the entire film encapsulating her experience of things first and foremost, from the start in her small town to the late introduction of Norman Maine, only through her eyes, to the way the film uses the whole thing as both cautionary tale and as biting satire of Hollywood. It's riddled with melodrama and is sometimes saccharine to compensate, with a saturated Technicolor palette and a slow, deliberate pace cut inside a relatively short running time, all calling cards of 1930s Hollywood fare. Esther is a fully realised and understandably old-fashioned character who makes the movie far more emotionally complex than I expected of this sort of film, with everything coming back around to her and how she processes the story's events, which makes Norman's late entrance in to the film, his continued involvement despite general unlikability, and his somewhat abridged character arc all fit well enough. This is Esther's perspective, and Norman is the cold mirror through which we perceive the fall after the rise that no-one wants to think about, and the idea that he would drown himself rather than get in her way is both a very powerful event for Esther and the most cutting thing you could say about how Hollywood perceives people as a commodity, even more than everyone's incessant exploitative words and actions.
A lot of this gets more layered when we see how the story is told in 1954. Bigger, brasher, but less biting, A Star is Born (1954) is every bit the excessive '50s Hollywood musical I expected it to be, down to the use of the red carpet opening. As much as I find this to be the best of the three films, I also can't help but find it lacking, specifically because everything that this film does was done shorter and sharper not two years before in Singin' in the Rain (aside from the ending). That said, as long as this film is and as soft the satire feels by comparison to both Singin' and its predecessor, the length is padded with good material and the call-outs of the Hollywood studio system are still present.
A lot of the new material has to do with how the film starts its leads off and where it goes with Norman. Instead of starting in her home town and exposing her to failure a few times before giving her a chance, Esther is already in Hollywood and has failed a few times by the time she's introduced to Norman; the character development is short-handed for the sake of how the movie wants to divide its time between the characters. In this introduction, the characters appear at around the same time, signifying the shared nature of the story this time around: Esther's poised for a rise and Norman for a fall with no more than a few moments on-screen. This is really succinct visual storytelling, with set-up for the movie's final turn in the opening scene and the symbolism for both the character's current states and the movie's entire process played out before a literal Hollywood audience. It's actually kind of amazing that a movie this concise in its storytelling at first glance is the one that goes for three hours.
Still, after this the movie treats Esther similarly to how she was treated in the original, but with far less naivety on her part; she's quite a bit more cynical and capable and world-weary, which means that significant aspects of the story have to change for it to still be believable that she would shackle herself to Norman and still have difficulty within the Hollywood system. The latter was easy enough for them to change, simply by reinforcing how unfair the system can be at all times and giving her the awareness to know it up-front and keep trying anyway. The former, however, required significantly more thought put in to the character of Norman Maine. This time around, he is far more complex, and by introducing him alongside Esther we get to see their respective career trajectories move alongside one another as well. A lot of hard moments in the original are given more despair than anger, such as the public nadir, where Norman strikes Esther, which is made accidental and far more apologetic. The emotions attached to his fall are as drawn out as the emotions attached to her rise are, and we see it largely from his perspective this time around, so his tragedy is much easier to attach to. The things that makes this ultimately watchable are the performances of the two leads. The original's Janet Gaynor and Fredric March were both great for their time, serving the melodrama while still appearing human, but with so much extra material to work with here, Judy Garland and James Mason make for easily the best coupling of these three movies. You can really believe that Mason as Maine was a real Hollywood darling who has orchestrated his own demise; he's both charmingly sincere and painfully closed off, at once supportive and too proud to admit that he needs help himself, he expresses all of the complex emotions understated or absent from the previous incarnation, free now with the time he is given to be a complete character. Garland is in a similar boat as Esther, evoking the best of Gaynor with an updated range fitting the new tone and the same complexity that makes the character all the more moving for the system she operates within.
Of course, there's also the musical numbers to add to the running time, which are as garish yet delightful as the best Hollywood musicals often are; there's not much for me to really say about them, they are a wonderful yet almost always unnecessary product of the era that ultimately add to the movie's experience because of how well they are put together. They are the '50s equivalent to an action scene, which is just fantastic at the best of times.
Then, there's the 1976 version.
While the 1954 version's musical numbers largely added to the experience, the 1976 version's musical numbers are the only reason to sit through it. No amount of poorly streamlined or re-oriented storytelling will remove Streisand's musical talent, but they can make the non-musical portions of this film often unbearably contrived or otherwise ridiculous. Instead of a satirical look at the Hollywood system, this film is transplanted in to the era of rock 'n' roll, and follows aspiring singer Esther Hoffman instead of aspiring actress Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester, as well as rock star John Norman Howard instead of fading star Norman Maine. It's so strange how poorly it comes together, in no small part due to the lack of chemistry between the two leads and particularly some surprisingly forced acting from Streisand (Kristofferson seems checked out, but it suits the character well enough here). It's all thrown together with so little thought.
Rather than derision at a system that propagates itself through always passing over of the old in favour of the new, the 1976 version seems completely unaware of the world outside its two main characters. This time we start with Norman instead of Esther, who seems to be within a solid place of stardom but behaves self-destructively regardless. This might initially seem like a comment on how the drug of stardom is itself the problem and not the fall from it, but instead the movie uses this opening as one of many ways to contrast how much of a mess Norman is in comparison to Esther. Where the 1954 re-make wised Esther up but also improved Norman as a person to compensate, here Esther is sharpened even further but Norman made more boorish and unlikable and even cartoonishly destructive. In the previous two versions, Norman is imprisoned for drunk and disorderly, but here he can shoot at a news helicopter and face no repercussions. These sorts of moments feel like they're supposed to mean something, but instead they're largely ignored or simplified or excused, and Esther ends up with Norman anyway.
It's a destructive relationship, more explicitly so than in previous versions, but the film can't quite get clear on its messaging, at once admonishing Norman, but then rewarding him, then destroying him, and then rewarding Esther for going through it all, but still wanting the tone of love from her as it builds to its climax. The film wants to have the focus squarely on the characters, even removing or streamlining other characters that had previously represented cogs in the system that dictated this story from the get-go, but it still needs Esther to make some of the decisions that make her a weaker character, without the reasoning behind those decisions being properly developed, while also wanting to present Esther as without fault. It feels like the predecessors' critical yet thoughtful and understanding perspective of Esther and Norman's relationship was thrown out the window with the changes to that relationship, and what we're left with is a toxic, abusive relationship with seemingly no redeeming factors that forgets why they came together in the first place. It's so contrived by comparison, with these forcibly 'deep' moments like Norman spray painting Esther's name on to the wall of his home even though it's only the second time they've met, or re-framing their marriage as her proposal and acceptance of his flaws rather than him proposing and getting turned down until he promises to stop drinking. Nothing about the film that's centred around these two really works, even at the best of times, and it's only the music that got me through this, even as it ends on a seven-minute rock ballad planted squarely on Streisand's face that ends with her in a Christ pose, no better a representation of this film's ego than in that moment.
As the third version shows, this story is easy to tell poorly, but the differences between all three show just how malleable and hopefully timeless this story is, the rise and the fall meeting side-by-side as powerful an idea made stronger by the recognition of the system in which it has to work in order to exist at all. The first two also serve as solid microcosms of the sort of style that was indicative of the time, and make great stepping stones for anyone wanting to look in to films of their respective eras. The third is less this, its only recognition of the world in which it was produced in the choice to make it about rock 'n' roll. With this in mind, I hope that the 2018 version gets right what the 1976 version got wrong, transplanting the story but using that story to recognise the toxicity of the system while also making complex and compelling characters for us to watch rise and fall, and by all accounts so far, it has.
276. Venom (2018) - October 4th
This wasn't good, although it wasn't particularly bad either. As far as weak franchise starters go, this at least had the decency to be better than the Dark Universe The Mummy or the DCEU Batman v Superman and keep everything that it does within the story it sets out to tell, with no forced segues in to set-up for future films outside of a post-credits scene. Beyond that, its general strengths and weaknesses have been highlighted in my review here. - 4.5/10
277. Top Gun (1986) - October 4th
Here's a movie whose legacy makes it a better film. Top Gun received middling reviews upon release, with a lot of praise deservedly directed towards to the movie's flight choreography and a lot of ire directed towards everything that involved characters talking. More than thirty years later and those dogfights still hold up as some of the best, from the editing to the design to the use of actual planes to make everything feel that much more real, but just as importantly the dialogue, the human moments in the film, the cheesy one-liners and the music, have all become iconic. That stuff is still 'bad' in the sense that it's a terrifically overdone example of the 80s' excessive style, but that style is now an important part of film canon that's been hugely influential on the development of the style of action movies, even today, and Top Gun is one of the most memorable contributions to this. In any other similarly styled movie I couldn't care less about the human elements, from the rivalry between loose cannon and dickish stickler, to the haphazardly conceived love story clearly designed as a box to check and a time filler, but here all of those pieces are on display in a movie that made those pieces common enough to be cliche in the first place. I had as much fun with the dogfights as I did counting off the number of times something in this film has been parodied or otherwise satirised since its release, some I hadn't even realised were references until I saw the film; this was a delightful time. - 7/10
278. Primeval (2007) - October 6th
I should be ashamed of the number of films on my list this year that are just bad crocodile movies. I should be, but I'm not, and I'm even slightly proud of this one, no matter how mad it is, because I find Dominic Purcell watchable in anything (even Blade: Trinity, which is still worse than this; and while I say this I haven't watched any of the Uwe Boll stuff he appeared in, which may easily cut my enthusiasm short). This is a big, dumb crocodile movie that tries to be slightly more than a big, dumb crocodile movie, but is so clumsy in the process that it ultimately comes off as a big, dumb, slightly insulting crocodile movie that only gets by on the fact that it's in a genre of almost entirely terrible movies, so decent effects, watchable performances, and anything more than 'croc eats idiots' makes this a near-zenith of its kind, which still puts it far closer to the bottom overall. - 3.5/10
279. Paper Man (2009) - October 6th
Emma Stone is always perfect, and everyone else from Jeff Daniels to Ryan Reynolds to Kieran Culkin all play appropriate character-actor roles, but it isn't enough to save this film from being anything more than a middling dramedy of the standard 'self-destructive adult learns a life-lesson' (or perhaps 'coming-of-middle-age') structure. The set-ups are contrived at best and what little wisdom given out is frightfully trite, the film's inflated sense of self-importance over such revelations about loneliness ultimately coming off as fake, which is a shame because there are moments where the acting or the music or even the dialogue come together enough to make it almost affecting, like the writers wanted it to be honest but didn't quite know how, and the actors knew enough to do what they thought was right, but never enough to overcome the inherently strange approach this film takes to its arrested development and awkward set-up. - 5/10
Published October 8th 2018
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