A Star is Born (1976)

I saw this movie in a theater 40 years ago when it was new. I didn’t remember much about it. I saw the original March - Gaynor more recently a couple of times. It’s a good story which is why it keeps getting remade. I’ve never watched the Judy Garland movie. And now Lady Gaga has one in the can about to be released. One for every generation I guess.
But this Kris Kristofferson - Barbra Streisand version showed up on Netflix and I decided to give it a go because I had not recalled anything negative about it. I’m glad I watched it again.

First off, all the singing in this movie is live. The audio of the voice is recorded at the same time as the picture. This adds enormous depth to the singer’s performance as opposed to the industry standard of pre-recording and lip sync on screen. I don’t like lip sync at all. It always looks fake to me. How can the performer really express showing physical emotion coming from their body if they are mostly attempting to move their lips in time with a recording they made sometime before? This is the worst thing that the movies have done with singing performers. It just makes them look foolish and pathetic, not powerful and present as they should.

It makes singing performers look ridiculous. It is a cheap insult to the audience to since it never really had to be done that way, it’s just easier.

(An example of how bad music and lip syncing can be in a movie can be seen in a movie of a couple years before this one with songs written by a contributor to this movie. That is The Phantom of the Paradise. It a pretty bad campy movie to begin with directed by a third stringer, but the very sloppy lip syncing is the worst I have ever seen. It’s like they don’t even try. Too busy doing lines of cocaine I guess. I never watched this movie before about a year ago. It is not at all good. It’s not even bad-good.)

But here we have a really well done version of the old Hollywood story and the power of Streisand’s live singing at the peak of her abilities makes it a very good movie. The singing in the movie is not like a conventional musical where the characters can’t help but sing. The story is about professional performers so the songs are on stage or in scenes in which one is playing a new song to another.
The Kris Kristofferson - Barbra Streisand relationship is believable because that both are appealing and sexy. Kris Kristofferson looks the part of a rock star even if his music doesn’t quite fit. The melodramatic aspects of the story are not at all overplayed.

The style of the movie is not far from the New Hollywood cinema of the post Easy Rider period. A Star is Born comes of as a New Hollywood musical complete with one of the period’s major directors, Paul Mazursky, in an acting role. It is not at all overly glamorous and this adds to the believability of the show.

This is a really well done movie.  

The Last Movie Star (2017) by Adam Rifkin

This is an odd little movie starring Burt Reynolds as an elderly movie star who is invited to a rinky-dink film festival in Nashville Tenn.

Vic, the Reynolds character, is old. He hobbles around with a walking stick. In the first scene he is letting go of his old sick dog at the vet. But he lives in a nice looking apartment and drives a mercedes so he’s not poor and on the street, just an aging movie star but no longer “rich” if he ever was. He gets the invitation for a festival and it’s lifetime achievement award. He lives in LA, were the movie stars are, of course, and talks about the invitation at outdoor lunch with his old buddy played by Chevy Chase. Chase is not in it much, apparently only worked one day as he is always seated at the same table the few times he pops up in the movie. The buddy convinces him to go to this thing.

He arrives in Nashville and finds nothing as expected which creates the conflict for the drama with some comic stuff.

The core of the movie is the relationship between Vic and the festival organizer’s 20 year old sister who has been recruited to be his driver for the duration in her beat up old car. This part is played by Ariel Winter, who apparently is a TV star on a show I’ve never watched. A lot of the movie is just the two of them with Vic advising her on her pathetic love life and her being put upon having to deal with this “Old Asshole” at all. She is kind of a white trash girl frustrated by her life.

There are a couple of scenes where Reynolds plays opposite his younger self. There is a scene like that is in a car and one on a small boat where young Burt is shooting fish in a river with a large bow. I don’t know what movies these were from. I was not at all interested it the movies he made in the 1970s, Smokey and the Bandit, etc. Anyway, these scenes are well done and add some visual spice to the movie as well as highlighting the contrast between young handsome Burt/Vic and the old man. At one point the Vic character is talking about his bad choices for acting roles in his heyday, while other male actors of that era did more quality and lasting films. I wonder if this is based on the real Reynolds. I would guess that the only movie he made that people still want to watch is Deliverance.
As far as I’m, concerned and can recall, The Last Movie Star is the best movie Burt Reynolds has ever done and he presents an interesting character with a believable performance.

Aside from the young woman, old star conflict, the movie has more than its fair share of looking back sentimental stuff. Writer Adam Rifkin, is only 50 so I feel he is projecting this stuff on the old and highlighting regret filled concerns that might not exactly be that of someone 80.

The rinky-dink film festival is presented as just film fans doing it out of love. Meanwhile I suspect that a lot of small film festivals are more cynical than that, ways for the organizers to make a little dough by taking in wannabe entrance fees and that sort of thing.

Ray Meets Helen (2018) By Alan Rudolph

I watched this new movie. Not out at the movie theater. I haven’t been to a movie theater in awhile. I watched it at home as a streaming rental from one of those big companies that sell that kind of stuff.

The movie is about a couple of old people down on their luck. Well, they just don’t have money which is part of the same thing. And Ray, played by Keith Carradine, is worse off than that because he has some kind of looming health crisis.

Anyway, they both come by some money separately and unbelievably. Then they meet up in a fancy/snobbish restaurant

Ray Meets Helen was written and directed by Alan Rudolph. We had watched a couple others of his movies lately including the great Choose Me with Keith Carradine again except it was made 40 years ago when he was a handsome young man and not the old guy he is and plays as Ray.
Movies are funny that way. Now with access to a lot of older movies practically instantly, one can watch someone go from young to old, well, to almost dead with a few clicks within the same hour.

This gives me the impression that life just zips by, that we are all young and old and here and gone at the same time and linier time is totally an illusion.

At any rate in this movie Carradine is old and so is Sandra Locke who plays Helen and so is Alan Rudolph who got all this together.

But one thing remains the same. That is that Alan Rudolph makes very amusing and thought provoking movies about the randomness of love/sex relationship. Because in a way, this movie is not at all remote from Choose Me.

I buy into this actually. These things are random here in the modern timeless USA. They have certainly been random in my life. My viewing companion and me as an example. I just saw her photo of Facebook one day maybe 6 years ago and throught, “Wow! I want THAT one.”

And here we are moments/years/instantly now/later. Just like in the movie when Ray approaches Helen in the restaurant.

Funny how things work that way.

Delightful how Alan Rudolph sees that and shows it to us in his hyper-realistic believable/unbelievable entertainments. He totally gets it. My kind of filmmaker for sure.