Not my thing

Rating: 6/10 (16 October 2018)

This film seemed to be a contrived story meant to also seem like a tale of the tough relaities of life. If it didn't hit you already, that is a contradiction. This film had a few of these.
For the record I have not seen any of other versions of th film.
For what the story was it was presented pretty well by the actors and crew. Solid acting from Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. However the pacing was awfully slow, but for that I blame the writers and editors.
With the exception of musicals, I'm rather terrible in following song lyrics when facing unfamiliar songs within movies. I suspect most people are like this but few admit it. Musical songs seem successful because their single purpose is providing story narrative rather than provide story narrative and acting as a commercially written song for a movie character. This movie seems to try to make hybrid songs which lie somewhwere imbetween. I was mostly bored while a lot of the songs were playing. Particularly near the middle and end when it was getting old.
The manager character and his interactions with the Lady Gaga's character were too inconsistent from moment to moment for me to take them seriously in the end. His motivation came off as for the purpose of the story as oppose resembling the characteristics of a real human.
Lady Gaga's character also went through some inconsistencies from moment to moment which bothered me. I couldn't decide if she wanted to be a sellout singer or an authentic musician is the middle to later part of the film. Much of her act later on seemed awful to me. And seemed awful by her own established standards early on. It was all rather difficult to follow seriously even though they tried to play those inconsistencies as part of the story, they just didn't provide enough justification for her to take conflicting opinions so often for me to buy it.
There were a good number of chick flick romantic gimmicks which were annoying. Although I can hardly say I was surprised about those given that some of them were in the trailers.
I'm sure plenty of people will like this one anyone. And say that many of the things I noticed were strengths rather than weaknesses. Well to me they were weaknesses.
So 6/10