5.9 | / 10 |
Users | 3.5 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
The tempestuous love affair between two rock singers, whose careers are on opposite trajectories.
Starring: Kris Kristofferson, Barbra Streisand, Gary Busey, Oliver Clark, Venetta FieldsRomance | 100% |
Musical | 55% |
Drama | 17% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital Mono
German: Dolby Digital Mono
Italian: Dolby Digital Mono
Spanish: Dolby Digital Mono
Spanish: Dolby Digital Mono (Spain)
Portuguese: Dolby Digital Mono
Czech: Dolby Digital Mono
Polish: Dolby Digital 2.0
English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Portuguese, Spanish, Czech, Korean, Polish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
"The hairdresser did good!" That phrase, spoken by a low-level publicist around a luncheon table at a Southern California restaurant where I happened to be sitting over the Christmas holidays in 1976, will forever define for me the third version of A Star Is Born, which starred Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson as star-crossed music superstars. In just four words, this effusive gossip had summed up the controversy, the bad pre-release press and the favorable outcome of what became one of the year's biggest hits. Allow me to explain. Streisand was already a huge star, with bestselling record albums and box office successes like Funny Girl (for which she won an Oscar), What's Up, Doc? and The Way We Were. Her significant other at the time was her former hairdresser, Jon Peters, who aspired to become a producer. Although Streisand didn't care for remakes, Peters sold her on A Star Is Born, because he had the advantage of simply not knowing that it was a remake. He just liked the script about rock musicians by veteran screenwriters John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. (The previous two incarnations had dealt with romance between two Hollywood actors, instead of musicians.) Streisand agreed to fund the film through First Artists Corporation, a modern version of United Artists founded by her, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Peters would get his shot at producing, with Streisand as executive producer. They hired yet another veteran screenwriter Frank Pierson (Dog Day Afternoon) to direct. Pierson substantially rewrote the script, and so eventually did many others, including Streisand herself. (She also reshot some of Pierson's scenes behind his back.) Songwriters Rupert Holmes, Paul Williams and Leon Russell were pulled into the mix to contribute, and Streisand made her first effort at writing her own songs. Holmes quickly gave up on the project, and Williams complained that Streisand kept interfering with his work, though his feelings were assuaged when their joint composition, "Evergreen", won the Oscar for best song (the film's only win). To play the part of the rock star whose plunging career trajectory demonstrates the dark side of success, the power couple first tried to recruit Elvis Presley, then Marlon Brando and, according to rumor, Mick Jagger. Eventually they cast Kris Krisofferson, who would later be quoted as saying that the experience "may have cured me of the movies". Shortly before the film opened on December 17, 1976, director Pierson, who apparently couldn't contain himself, boiled over in an exposé published in New West magazine, airing every behind-the-scenes dispute from the film's production in excruciating detail. Peters was a bully and Streisand an indecisive control freak. They weren't in charge, and they wouldn't let anyone else be. But the last laugh was on Pierson. Streisand's fans turned out in droves to see the film. Even Peters' detractors grudgingly acknowledged that, novice though he was, he'd put together a decent piece of entertainment. Peters would go on to produce or executive produce such films as Flashdance, The Color Purple, Rain Man and, of course, his greatest success, Tim Burton's Batman, which cemented his reputation as a major Hollywood player. For all the carping and complaining, the hairdresser did good.
Three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Surtees (Ben-Hur, The Bad and the Beautiful and King Solomon's Mines) shot A Star Is Born, for which his photography netted him another Oscar nomination. Films of the Seventies are often noted for their "in your face" grit, but Surtees cast an old-school sheen of studio glamor over the whole of A Star Is Born, imbuing every frame with the romance of show biz success, even when the events happening on screen were less than ennobling. An obvious measure of Surtees' achievement is the number of times that Streisand, recording her commentary thirty years later, exclaims over how good he made everything look. Warner is in top form with their 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray. The source material is in pristine condition (or flawlessly restored), and the resolution of fine detail is some of the best I have seen. In the various concert performances, the ability to distinguish individual faces in the massive crowds is especially impressive. Fine details of clothing and hair styles (for better or worse, the Seventies not having been a great era for fashion or style) are readily identifiable. Black levels are excellent, and colors are beautifully delineated, ranging from the garish lighting of the concerts to the earth tones of John Norman's ranch. I can't recall a single frame where I thought, "This doesn't look right." The film has a fine, natural-looking grain pattern, and nothing about it looks digital or artificially manipulated. Compression errors were not an issue, with an average bitrate of 25.96 Mbps.
A Star Is Born is reputedly the first film released in Dolby Surround (though not the first in "surround"). The Blu-ray's DTS-HD MA 5.1 track is presumably based on the original mix. However, until the success of Star Wars initiated a push for theaters to upgrade their audio capabilities, sound designers remained conservative in their use of rear channels, except for big-budget extravaganzas (which this was not). The mix is front-centered, with the rear channels largely limited to providing a sense of a spaciousness for the musical performances, many of which were sung live on camera, at Streisand's insistence. (It was as much a novelty then as it is today, when director Tom Hooper employed it on Les Misérables.) Mixed by Phil Ramone and differing, often considerably so, from the enormously successful soundtrack album released simultaneously with the film, the musical numbers sound excellent on this Blu-ray's track, with clarity and dynamic range that convey the sense of a live performance without blurring into the kind of aural mud into which so many overamplified concerts often degenerate. The dialogue is generally clear, except occasionally when Kristofferson swallows a word here and there.
The extras have been ported over from the 2006 DVD edition released by Warner, which was also a digibook.
In her commentary, Streisand noted that A Star Is Born had been remade every twenty years or so and that another version was past due. When she recorded her comments, there were rumors of a new version, but so far none has been confirmed. Perhaps no one has been able to figure out how to recast the story for an age in which stardom has been radically transformed by the internet, social media and reality TV. Fame now has a much shorter half-life than when any of the three Star movies were made, and the desire for privacy that informs all of them has far less resonance in a world where people gladly fling it away just for the opportunity to appear on television or get a million hits on YouTube. Would a modern audience relate to John Norman's desire to withdraw to the solitude of his ranch and shut out the world? Or would they be screaming at him to negotiate a contract for his own reality show on Bravo called "Mr. Hoffman's World"? We do need a new Star Is Born, but it wouldn't look anything like the previous three. In the meantime, Warner's Blu-ray of the 1976 version is highly recommended for its technical quality, with due regard for its limitations as a film.
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