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As Good As It Gets

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

A star is reborn as Judy Garland returns to Hollywood after a four year absence for this headlining role where you can clearly see the woman in her replacing the young girl whose career started so spectacularly in "The Wizard Of Oz" some 15 years earlier. Yes we all know the story about the falling star coming into the orbit of the rising comet but played as convincingly as it is here and with marvellous song production numbers to boot, this really is almost a last hurrah for golden age Hollywood and all it stood for but at the same time it's adult themes of alcoholism and disintegrating marriage point forward to more a modern, sophisticated realism.We're properly introduced to Garland when she sings perhaps the ultimate torch song "The Man Who Got Away", with a powerhouse delivery which still doesn't overpower the song and immediately ensnares the passing ear of Hollywood legend Norman Maine, played with understated and underrated elan by James Mason. Yes, the movie plays Mason's alcoholism less like the disease we nowadays understand it to be today and more like an almost wilful career-choice done almost to attract attention by a fading yesterday man such as Maine.Wonderfully staged and sympathetically directed by George Cukor, Garland's musical numbers are vivacious and heartwarming apart from a hackneyed Vaudevillian medley of over-heard Jolson songs, the best of them for my money probably being Judy putting on a one-woman show for Norman in her own living room.Both leads you feel get right into their roles only very occasionally teetering into florid melodrama. Jack Carson and Ronald Bickford also deserve praise for their supporting turns, the former as Maine's long suffering press agent who eventually has his day and the latter as the supportive, nurturing film producer caught between both camps.Sure the ending is maybe slightly over the top as Maine makes the ultimate sacrifice for his wife but you'd have to be made of stone not to be affected by the final scene with Garland in close-up delivering one of the classic final lines you'll ever hear in any movie.This is a musical good enough to stand as a drama without its songs and with songs good enough to carry any other straight movie with even the flimsiest of story-lines. Put both these aspects together, mix in with convincing performances by the leading actors and a fine soundtrack and you really do have one of the very best musicals, indeed calling it just a musical is to somehow miss the point of a brave, ambitious and greatly rewarding film.

. . . by a craven Hollywood community totally cowed by the Witch Hunters in the voting for the "best picture" Oscar of 1954, as American turncoat super-snitch director Elia Kazan's anti-Labor screed, ON THE WATERFRONT, took a cowardly plurality of votes away from A STAR IS BORN. The latter George Cukor picture is a landmark in Irony, as the real-life primary victim of Tinsel Town's "studio system" at its worst--Judy Garland--is forced into essentially caricaturing her past and future Passion of Frances Ethel Gumm, right down to being convinced by the make-up department that she has a Frankenstein face. Remarkably, Cukor presents James Mason's elderly alcoholic character, "Norman Maine," as STAR's tragic focus. As Gertrude Stein always said, "a drunk is a drunk is a drunk," and at "Norman's" age, the only pathos involved in his passing at sea is that he did not croak SOONER. Ms. Garland herself, expiring at age 47, Philip Seymour Hoffman (46), Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (46), John Candy (43), Elvis (42), Paul Walker (40), Chris Penn (40), Anna Nicole Smith (39), Corey Haim (38), Sal Mineo (37), Bobby Darin (37), Robert Williams (37), Marilyn Monroe (36), Jayne Mansfield (34), John Belushi (33), Carole Lombard (33), Chris Farley (33), Brittany Murphy (32), Bruce Lee (32), Rudolph Valentino (31), Heath Ledger (28), Brandon Lee (28), Edie Sedgwick (28), Jean Harlow (26), Brad Renfro (25), James Dean (24), River Phoenix (23), Aaliyah (22), Freddie Prinze (22), Heather O'Rourke (12), and countless other actors died young enough to become tragic figures in Real Life; not so "Norman Maine," even in fiction. And, of course, Judy herself filmed STAR exactly halfway between playing OZ's 12-year-old "Dorothy Gale" and passing away herself, which constitutes the biggest "tragedy" of all!

This film has a lot of history and baggage, to be sure. Judy Garland had been dropped from "The Barkleys of Broadway" (which resulted in the happy reunion of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in their only Technicolor movie) and "Annie Get Your Gun" and she and her fans were hopeful that "A Star Is Born" would be her big comeback vehicle. I recently viewed the movie on Blu-ray, not having seen it before, and I have to say that I was not overwhelmed by any of it. In fact, I found a good bit of it annoying. It was too long and should have been cut, though that should have been done by George Cukor, not the studio. I know that the Judy-Garland-can-do-no-wrong crowd won't like this, but she was, in my opinion, a bit too old and a bit too plump for the part and in all of her musical numbers, she is just trying so hard to knock it out of the park, the result is performances that are too over-the-top and frantic. Everything about this film seems bloated, dated, and just boring. The insertion of stills to fill in for missing footage is distracting, too. It would have been better to have done as they did with the recent "South Pacific" release and offered two versions--the complete, "restored" roadshow version, with the stills and extra footage, and the shortened version. In sum: this is a curiosity item and not without interest, but not the masterpiece that many would claim. If you are looking for a showcase of Judy's mature singing talent, this may be your cup of tea. Otherwise, forget it.

This is a remarkable film. Remarkably long, for starters, and I can see why Warner Brothers execs wanted it trimmed down from 182 minutes to 154 minutes (the restored version seen today is at 176 minutes).It's also remarkable because it shows a bit about what Hollywood was like, since many of the scenes used real movie studios locations.But, of course, it's most remarkable because of the performance by Judy Garland. But it's remarkably pathetic that this role -- of a woman standing by her husband, who is a drunk -- so paralleled her own life (in reverse) of drug addiction and alcohol. I'm old enough to remember Judy Garland's television specials in the 1950s and 1960s, and my grandparents (whom I lived with) commenting each time about how Garland looked and that she "wouldn't be alive much longer". And their predictions that she'd commit suicide successfully before long. Nevertheless, she was a grand actress, and her musical numbers here (especially "The Man Who Got Away") are truly impressive.The film is also remarkable because of co-star James Mason. Not usually of my favorites, although aside from Ronald Colman, the actor with the most distinctively charming voice. But he is excellent in this film.Jack Carson and Charles Bickford, in supporting roles, are excellent, as well.Well worth a watch, and this will end up on the DVD shelf of anyone who follows Judy Garland. And, this outshines the earlier and later versions of the story.