A Star Is Born

The bad news first.  A Star Is Born gets bogged down in its second half and, like all too many recent movies, could have been twenty minutes shorter.  Also the second half features some pop music which is dreadful (I enjoyed that the movie was an indictment of modern pop).  Actually, since you know exactly how this movie is going to turn out they could have skipped from the middle to Lady Gaga's closing number.

The good news:

The first half is dynamic and completely enjoyable with the exhilarating immediacy of the music scenes, the best I've seen in a non-documentary film other than Get On Up, the James Brown biopic.

All of the music is original - most of it composed by Willie Nelson's son with contributions from Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga - and it's quite good (including the pop stuff which is supposed to be obnoxious).  I didn't know Cooper could compose, play, and sing (though I knew he was one of our nation's finest air guitarists).

The film looks great - kudos to first time director Cooper.

I became a Lady Gaga fan.  She was captivating.  I never paid much attention to her before because of the atrocious pop music videos and her weird costumes.  Here, at least in the first half, she appears with very little makeup and she's a good looking lady.  It also turns out she's a fine actress and she and Cooper have terrific chemistry together (as do Cooper and Sam Elliot - Cooper's character even sounds like Elliot).  And boy, can she sing!  I'm going to get that record of duets she recorded with Tony Bennett.  She has range, tonal control, and a throaty undertone.  Even though I was disappointed in the last section of the film make sure you stick around to hear her closing song.

Though updated from the 1950s and 1970s film versions it is also a surprisingly old-fashioned movie thematically.  A Star Is Born is about the importance of marriage, the efforts the two principals make to sustain it, what both are willing to sacrifice for each other, and, ultimately the different priority each places on career versus marriage.