Blinders off

Rating: 1/10 (9 October 2018)

I'm going to write this review as though I didn't know there were four previous remakes.
I thought this film would really focus on a hidden talent with a beautiful soulful being discovered.
This is what happens. A beautiful vulnerable open singer (gaga) who sings at a drag club is discovered singing la vie on rose by a famous singer (cooper). The chemistry between these two actors works. The opening moments are vulnerable and honest with a few cute and endearing moments. Bradley looks lovingly at her and twinkles his eyes with a wide tight grin, which he reuses over and over again in the movie.
There are holes in bad editing about why the characters keep getting pulled together when you look at it frame by frame. Lady Gaga has vocal range and can rise seamless from a deep loud belt to a soft vulnerable falsetto. Her acting is great in the opening and in the second half it falls through and is incongruent with her arc and relationship but is still relatively good. The directing choices made for gaga by cooper were not good for the second half of the film. Gaga also lacks emotional depth in her eyes and facial expressions though I've seen her in interviews and She is capable of making them. The female character is not well or strongly written. Bradley coopers character and arc get really good in the second half of the film and it's a killer performance. There are a ton of cheesy cliche lines that are delivered by the actors as such. The sentimental nose thing that they do three times in the movie endearing how Bradley loves her nose is over done and forced every time it is done after the scene where she is outside her house which was done well the first time.
The story is what gets me the most. I am no stranger to addiction or careers in the arts but this is a problem with Hollywood that will persist to getting oscars. A male alc addict who was drinking buddies with his dad finds a beautiful rose (Gaga) and does not want to pluck it or kill its soul because that would kill the talent. So instead he lets her be added to his performance. She is poor waitressing tables and he is a millionaire. He feels bad about killing her soul musically when she makes cheap music after her manager transforms her into something that she is not. His relationship with her is not enough to push him over the edge so the manager tells cooper he is bad for Gaga when he is finishing rehab which pushes his to commit suicide. His relationship with her and guilt wasn't enough to do that it was this strange manager who was very guilt tripping and aggressive and wasn't deeply developed enough as a character. She is untraditionally beautiful but has a beautiful soul but is coerced into making cheap music and lyrics changing everything about her appearance and dancing sexily. She has the ultimate struggle that everyone women faces but the depths of it are not seen and the focus protagonist and one we are directed to sympathize with is cooper. He is sad about how the industry takes women with soul and cheapens them to make money and she has a beautiful soul and has to sacrifice herself to "make it" but none of the emotional strides she goes through in that department are truly seen or felt. Instead she feels guilty about his addiction and he kills himself because he feels guilty for her soul dying in the sacrifices for fame because the manager pushes him to do so through guilt tripping. Gaga struggles the most with her character being a deeply profound lyricist with critical thoughts about the world having to "so easily" give up herself for stardom. The transition is not present in the direction or writing but is critical to the pathos of the story. Instead we sympathize for an rich rock star that got to write deep lyrics and sing on stage by himself while she was happy singing with her drag friends being her full self and then had to lose all of her soul and change her looks to something she was not for fame. That struggle is not even depicted in the movie or felt. And it ends up being a sympathizer movie of an alcoholic that faced way less life adversity and then committed suicide. While we know her situation financially was weak but artistically and soulfully full in the beginning and then gets flipped upside down, but we do not truly or deeply see that struggle and transformation. Coops acting at the second half was great, but a lot of the self indulgent directing took away for what this movie could have been and the depth of their relationship.