A Star is Born

He's just Gaga for you

Grade: B

Director: Bradley Cooper

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott, Dave Chappelle and Andrew Dice Clay

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 15 min.

A Star is Born is like an old song being covered by new performers. It’s enjoyable to observe different interpretations and nuances being fleshed out, to hear how the piece is re-imagined. But the strictures of the original composition remain, a familiarity that can be both nostalgic and inhibiting.

Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) is an aging, scruffy singer-songwriter whose cling to celebrity is fueled by booze and pills. After a concert, Jack stumbles into a drag bar where Ally (Lady Gaga) is performing a rendition of “La Vie En Rose.” Jack is instantly smitten, and after an all-night charm offensive, Ally becomes smitten, too. There’s genuine chemistry between the two, with the credit going to the actors and Cooper as the film’s director (more on that later).

Jack sweeps Ally off her feet and then onto stage, where she becomes a sudden sensation. The rest of A Star is Born comprises Ally’s shooting star crossing paths with Jack’s fading fame. Save for one raw scene of exasperation and jealousy, Jack and Ally remain hopelessly devoted to each other even as their coupling is ultimately doomed by age and circumstance, a concession to audience wanting a love story that drains dramatic tension from the storyline.

But Cooper the director takes his time, a pace that often grinds the film to a crawl but is nonetheless necessary to allow the characters to develop organically. That’s especially the case with Jack’s complicated relationship with his much older brother Bobby, who is played by Sam Elliott in a performance that deserves all the awards nominations. Indeed, the entire cast is well-served by Cooper’s lens, handheld camerawork that glides and swoops around the actors, capturing the intimate contours of their visages. It becomes a window into the characters’ soul, more revealing than anything in the stodgy story.

The fourth movie iteration of this rags-to-riches parable looks to plumb dramatic depths barely scratched in the previous three editions. By casting its leads as singers, the film instantly skews closer to the 1976 Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand melodrama. But this latest version is more focused on the struggle, nay obsession to both gain notoriety and avoid losing it. It feels like a film à clef at times, including the casting of Andrew Dice Clay (as Ally’s father) and Dave Chappelle (as Jack’s former musician buddy)—Clay’s character believes he could have been as big as Sinatra, while Chappelle’s character is content that he left the fast life behind. As Ally, Lady Gaga is a singer long denied a big break because her nose is too big. Then, once stardom strikes, the talented songwriter finds herself morphed and molded into a sequined pop star. Even here, Ally also never relinquishes her grounding despite Jack’s repeated worries that she’ll lose her way, another concession to Ally’s piety that feels like a concession to the aura of the actress playing her.

A Star is Born only truly comes to life when Gaga and Cooper are on stage. And it’s fun to watch the actors pull the curtain back on themselves and the entertainment industry. But the feeling of “been there, done that” is inescapable.

The Good Dinosaur

Jurassic Lark

Grade: C –

Director: Peter Sohn

Starring the voices of: Raymond Ochoa, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Marcus Scribner, Steve Zahn, Anna Paquin and Sam Elliott

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

The Good Dinosaur imagines a world where dinosaurs didn’t become extinct. Unfortunately, the resulting butterfly effect produces an alternate Pixar Animation Studios that makes lazy, unoriginal movies. After reclaiming its reputation with Inside Out earlier this year, this is arguably Pixar’s poorest production to date.

The film conceives a backstory in which the asteroid that wiped out the dinos veers away from Earth. Rather than merely lending dinosaurs anthropomorphic features (as Pixar has done with nonhuman protagonists in nearly all their animated films), here they evolve over millions of years into English-speaking frontiersman. Poppa Henry (voiced by Jeffrey Wright) and Momma Ida (Frances McDormand) are rearing three apatosaurus kids to eventually take over the family farm. However, Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), their youngest, is kind-hearted but weak and fearful.

Henry tasks Arlo with killing the critter stealing their winter corn in order to earn his familial bona fides. But as Henry and Arlo track the culprit, a snarling prehistoric caveboy, Henry is swept away and killed by a flash flood. When Arlo next chases the caveboy, it also ends with Arlos being carried away by raging rapids and deposited far from home. Arlo and the feral Neanderthal boy, who Arlo names Spot, join together to traverse treacherous terrain and find their way home.

The Good Dinosaur quickly transitions into Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, if re-imagined by a focus group of fourth graders. Arlo and Spot—seemingly patterned after Chris Kattan’s old Mr. Peepers character from “Saturday Night Live”—encounter a surreal setting that includes a disturbingly dimwitted styracosaurus and psychotic, predatory pterodactylus. For some reason, this dino evolution mirrors human culture, so we also have an American West complete with redneck dialect spouted by yokels with names like Bubbha and Lurleane. Arlo and Spot join up with a trio of T. rex ranchers (including one voiced by Sam Elliott, natch) to thwart a herd of velociraptor rustlers. Cue the fiddle and harmonica.

The lurching mood fluctuates from syrupy to trippy to dark. Likewise, gorgeous animated renderings of the high Sierra landscape contrast with the reductive representation of Arlo’s Dino the Dinosaur look. Characters intone feel-good bromides like, “Sometimes you gotta get through your fear to see the beauty on the other side.” Huh?

Initial production on The Good Dinosaur began in 2009, and this final product betrays the project’s troubled history, which includes several changes of director, writer and cast. What’s left is sweet but boring, a film that’s visually stimulating but thematically slight. In other words, it’s more Disney than Pixar, resulting in the latter’s first mediocre effort (yes, even worse than Cars 2).

That said, it’s almost worth enduring the rest of the film just to hear Sam Elliott growl, “If you ain’t afraid of a crock biting you on the face, then you’re not alive.” Almost.