Pain, fame, and Mrs. Norman Maine

Ohai. I wrote about a movie this week. But first...like what I've done with the place? Make sure to check out the Simply Streisand fanpage, the "Weekly Sanging" showcase, and, of course, the badass new logo.

Anywho....

A STAR IS BORN

In the cinema you'll find two types of legitimate tearjerkers (and by legitimate I mean those that don't feature the words "adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks" in the credits). One breed is the Realist Wrencher, where characters are placed in circumstances so harrowing and close-to-the-bone that we spill over with fear and gratitude all at once; I'm thinking The Deer Hunter,Schindler's List, etc. Then there's the Tinseltown Tragedy. You know what I'm talkin' 'bout-those old Hollywood lulus where the even the most miserable moment is orchestrated with such sprawling grandeur that you can't help but feel ecstatic, even as you blink back tears. Hearts are worn on multi-million dollar sleeves and bleed onto the screen in spectacular Technicolor. And in the realm of enrapturing, exquisite old Hollywood melodrama, A Star Is Born reigns paramount.

The picture is a remake of an already-cliched original, but the embarrassment of technical expertise and top-line talent brushes off all the old bromides and makes them shine anew. No warm-up for this puppy; we begin with one of the most opulent sequences in the decidedly ostentatious culture of old Hollywood. A gala for the stars. An army of flashbulbs, waving hands, craning heads. An auditorium that seats thousands, dressed to the nines. The wavy red curtains part. A massive orchestra rolls in on a giant setpiece. Everyone's ready for the much-touted appearance of renowned actor Norman Maine (James Mason)...except Maine himself, who's drunk as a skunk backstage. When he stumbles onstage clearly hammered in the middle of crooner Esther Blodgett's (Judy Garland) opening set, Blodgett integrates him into the act without missing a beat-ah, he's only playing drunk!-thus saving his reputation. Thus begins Maine's one-man mission to turn Blodgett into the next big thing. It's no surprise they fall in love along the way. Not so anticipated is that, while Esther begins her climb towards transcendent stardom, Norman's life begins to fall apart before his very eyes...

Oh, I'm sorry, were you looking for subtlety? Ingmar Bergman's got a whole shelf for you to check out. This one's all about the grand gesture. The charm of Old Hollywood cinema was its frankness, its what-you-see-is-what-you-get purity. Take that opening scene for example. In our age of cyber-cynicism, we'd probably get a couple jabs at the vanity of celeb life, punctuated with some half-hearted attempts at symbolism; in short, everyone involved would be very keen on exposing the rotting core beneath the glam-bang facade. But here, there is no "real point"; we begin at a premiere, instead of a cafe or a garden or just a regular nightclub perf, because it gives director George Cukor and co. the opportunity to stage a real jaw-dropper of a crowd scene. From the moment we follow that spotlight down into the midst of the crowd, we're gone. There isn't a moment in this picture not designed to stick firmly in the memory. The result is an exceedingly fervent feeling f incredulous rapture as we realize that for every trick pulled out of the bag, there're a dozen more of greater scope and sublimity.

Take Norman and Esther's meet-cute, for example. Backstage after her number, Esther's all in a tizzy. "Why is Norman Maine still in pictures?", she huffs. "You know, I ask myself that every morning." The camera pulls back. Norman is standing there, amused smile on his face. He palms her lipstick. Scrawls a heart on the backstage wall. Scribbles their initials inside. He asks her out. She turns him down, but offers a hint of hope in a gem of a line: "Maybe tomorrow night or the next night. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll lay out a whole supply of lipsticks, and we'll celebrate all over the place." A wry smile and then goodnight.

Today, you'd likely see a scene like this saved for the final act, plopped in before the credits roll to redeem middling material. Here, Cukor is so confident in the wonders to follow that he gives us this little miracle in the first ten minutes. And this in a three-hour picture! Cukor's confidence makes sense though; we don't know it, but he's aware that among the things in store are a glorious nightclub scene; an exciting excursion to the big city; a touching marriage proposal; a twenty minute jazz medley giving the inexhaustible Garland her due; and a heart-tugging ending to end all heart-tugging endings. Rare is a movie with a true trump card; even rarer is one with a full deck.

And then there's the score, which kicks in when the ever-present drama is at its peak, knocks the picture into exhilarating overdrive. In original studio musicals, too often the music serves as pleasant augmentation, nothing more; I love Easter Parade and Gigi as much as the next guy, but beyond the one or two signature numbers, the rest of their musical numbers serve as little more than B-grade balls for A-grade talent to knock out of the park. Here, every individual song is a winner. "Gotta Have Me Go With You." "The Man That Got Away." "It's A New World." "My Melancholy Baby." "You Took Advantage of Me." "Lose That Long Face." "Swanee." If these songs weren't already standards from radio play prior to the picture, they all are now. The music-and-lyrics team was one-of-a-kind-the dreamy decadence of Harold Arlen coupled with the winning wordplay of Ira Gershwin produced rapturous results, and if they songs smart on their own, they fairly smolder when Garland wraps them in the gilded glory of her euphoric tremolo.

Ah, so now we arrive at Garland, the reason this picture works. I say this at no discredit to Mason, who breaks your heart time again with his blithe yet brutal self-serration. But the fact of the matter is that it's our knowledge of Judy's prior career that made this film stick upon its release, and the particulars of her sad final years that allow it to age so peerlessly.

Let's leap ahead in time. 1976. A Star is Born is remade with none other than God herself, Barbra Joan Streisand, and Kris Kristofferson. This movie should've worked. The score's fairly strong, with multiple opportunities for that Streisand voice to really tear into it, the script is better than it was given credit for, and both the crowd scenes and the one-on-one dialogues are expertly photographed. Yet we can't really get into it all. The same goes for 1937 drama on which this one was based; Janet Gaynor does her damnedest, but it comes off as passable entertainment now, nothing more.

Let's think about this. Streisand had three hit albums, a Grammy, a Tony, and an Oscar all before age 25, and has spent the 40-odd years since releasing albums met with either critical acclaim or audience approval or both. Gaynor was the first winner of the Best Actress Oscar, carried a successful marriage, and had such a reputation for excellence across the board that she was often given the opportunity to pick her roles carte blanche. Now look at Garland. Around the time this picture was made, she was fresh off another in a series of suicide attempts. She was gaining weight rapidly. MGM had unceremoniously kicked her to the curb. Her mother was slandering her in the press. Everyone loved Judy, and wanted to see her beat the odds. They wanted to see her shine brighter than ever before. They wanted her-and, by extension, Esther Blodgett-to be happy. Moss Hart's screenplay cannily played on this national desire, drawing frequent parallels to Garland's stage roots, her famous vulnerability, her perfectionist persona. Esther's drive to succeed dovetailed with America's deep need to see their songbird soar again. Moreover, the madness and misery of the previous years had left Garland desperate for an outlet, one she clearly found in the character. Her Esther is nakedly ambitious, nervously witty, quietly hurting-one of the great 20th century screen creations, a startlingly incisive portrait that pokes holes in Gaynor and Streisand's vanity turns. How did she ever lose that Oscar?!

Today, Garland's unique presence aids the film in another way. As we all know, Garland's shining star was soon to be snuffed out-she overdosed on barbiturates at age 47. It was an ugly death, a tragic death, one that left a gaping hole in the fabric of our popular culture. It's a hole that still remains. Before she was an actress or singer, Judy was an Entertainer with a capital E-a woman with an electric presence who threw herself at us with such giddy force-of-will that we had no choice but to forget our troubles and join her for the ride. With Streisand, you're bowled over by every little detail of her exquisite interpretations; Garland made you forget the details altogether, went straight for the jugular.

We've never had an entertainer like her, and as such, the loss still stings. But this film is around to offer some salve. For three hours, Garland is up there, threatened by the very vices that plagued her in real life but strong enough to rise above them, enshrouded by darkness but blessed with that extra watt of ebullience needed to survive this hardscrabble world. We have, as pop culture consumers, an irrational need; something in us requires that little Dorothy Gale from Kansas never stop singing. Thanks to A Star is Born, she never will.

Proof that we're living in the last days; some idiot lost a good 10 minutes of ASIB footage, and, as such, a small chunk of the picture's middle section is composed of stills, voiceovers, and background music. It's more than a little frustrating that one of the great American studio releases is missing some integral pieces, but I make a plea for patience on your part. The other 160-ish minutes, I assure you, are quite quite good. In fact, they are among the very best.

The Writing's On The Wall: Facebook on Film

It is inevitable that, somewhere along the line, those filming a documentary will become a part of the action, voluntarily or not. So gripe all you want about the undeniable fact that the majority the action of Catfish is steered by the folks behind the camera, but you can't deny the overwhelming power of where it ends up, at an alarming crossroads of brutal, brilliant revelation that gets at some of the central tragedies of our time. Here is this year's Academy Award winner for Best Documentary.

We follow Yaniv "Nev" Schulman, an unshaven schlub of a New York photographer, daft and a tad horny but somehow more than a little lovable. When Nev receives a painting of one of his photos from 8-year-old artistic prodig Abby Martin he friends her on Facebook, ultimately becoming involved with her family and striking up a long-distance relationship with her half-sister Megan. Only when Yaniv sets out with camera-toting brother Ariel and his good friend Henry to pay a surprise visit to his beloved do the cracks in the tapestry begin to show....but enough. The less said about Catfish in all respects, the better your viewing experience will be. I'm sure you've heard about the whopper of a twist, which actually occurs about midway through the picture. I won't spoil it, but I will say that if you've happened upon its specifics and responded with rolled eyes, you oughtn't judge a book by its cover. The plot point, shocking as it is, doesn't define this film. Ariel and Henry have corralled mountains of pixelated video and grainy soundbites into a lean, steadily engrossing character study, not of a few people but of an entire generation whose ability to connect has slowly, dangerously metastasized into an excuse to escape. As Nev learns the truth about Megan, we learn the truth about ourselves. So skip out on Life As We Know It. Across the hall in the little theater with the faulty air conditioning where indies go to die, this smartly assembled, indescribably disturbing, entirely necessary picture presents a hellish but not entirely hopeless picture of life as we know it.

Or, you could plunk down a totally worth-it ten bucks and see what's basically an anomaly in these days of Heigl-happy hellfire; a great mainstream movie, one that just so happens to cover much of the same ground as Catfish, albeit from the other side of the laptop screen. You've seen the ads. You've read the articles. And, chances are, a chosen few of you have understandably dismissed it as "the Facebook movie". The Social Network is indeed just that, but I don't see the label as an insult. After all, aren't we the Facebook nation? Has any other single website caused such a paradigm shift in how we interact with friends? With enemies? With ourselves? Here is a devilishly entertaining true-life legal drama that doubles as a first-class tragedy given to unshakable moments of almost Shakesperean sublimity. It's a tad earlier to be prepping best lists, but I will say this; if a better film comes along this year, we'll be the luckiest audience in the world.

At heart, this one's all about betrayal. There's Harvard whiz-kid Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), hired by his classmates the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer plays both thanks to the galvanizing magic of CGI) to create a college social networking site. There's Eduardo Savarin (Andrew Garfield), the twiggish softie who helps Mark form a website suspiciously similar to the one he promised to design for the Winklevosses, then unknowingly deprives them of credit. And there's Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), former Napster CEO, ladies men, Iago in designer duds, who sends Mark skyrocketing in the upper stratospheres of financial fruition while slowly snaking his way into Eduardo's position. That's when the lawsuits come in. The ones that involve sex, drugs, and a larger sum of money than it'd take to send a thousand kids to Mark's beloved Harvard.

This sordid saga proof is that truth outpaces fiction, and it has a one-thing-after-another quality that could come off as bad John Grisham in the hands of a weaker writer than Aaron Sorkin, who structures the picture as a series of measured, savvy conversations interrupted by startling cannonades of blistering verbal dynamite. This screenplay is so good I caught audience members ducking and sweating at certain lines as if they were thousand-dollar explosions. But a screenplay's only so much without a cast that can meet its demands, and here we have a series of rising stars who shine so bright they incinerate even our highest expectations. Eisenberg won't win the Oscar for this performances. It's too subtle, too controlled, too unshowy. But it's a performance that will be lauded for years to come as a shining portrayal of an anti-hero, a shrewd, sharp dissection of a man blessed with such superior intellect that he can outthink even himself. More likely to have a shot at an acceptance speech is Garfield, as he gets the kind of Major Meltdown scene that makes older voters cream themselves. But let's hope they also notice the uncanny skill with which he builds to this searing eruption. And then there's Timberlake, who outdoes any artistic output in his career thus far. He slyly plays on our image of him as a performer, shows how Sean's skill with seduction in both bedroom and boardroom blinds Mark to his corroded conscience and coked-out paranoia. He spins like a top, and our jaws plummet in astonishment. All this near idol-worship and I haven't even gotten to Jeff Croneweth's cinematography, subdued yet stunning, or Trent Reznor's score, which runs rings around the meandering, spaced-out crap that tends to pass as movie music these days. And the best for last, director David Fincher, who cements himself as a boundlessly imaginative filmmaker and an astute social commentary. He's here to stay. So is the picture.

And now, kiddies, for my recommendation. See these two films in the same day. I'd suggest Catfish first, followed by a nice long lunch break, and then a viewing of The Social Network to cap off the experience. We make fun of the FB phenom, but we do it at our own peril-after all, how many Facebook posts have you seen about the stupidity of Facebook movies? Catfish tells of a virus rapidly infecting our country, a desire to maximize at-a-distance contact so as to perfect our words, our looks, our actions. The Social Network shows us how the strain was planted, by people twice as smart as most of us but also twice as insecure. They started it to encourage exclusivity. Then they stumbled upon an entire nation of people like Yaniv Schulman-a United States united by a need to belong. Both films: A