Tag: Lady Gaga

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Film Features Film/TV

House of Gucci

Ridley Scott’s HOUSE OF GUCCI A Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures film Lady Gaga stars in House of Gucci as Patrizia Reggiana, the “Black Widow” of Italy, who ordered the assassination of her husband Maurizio Gucci. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer)

Before he became Noted Auteur Ridley Scott, the English director made a big mark in advertising. In the late ’70s, Scott was hired to revamp the visual brand of Chanel No. 5 perfume. The commercial he made in 1979 would go down as an all-time classic: As a model lounges by a pool, the shadow of a private jet briefly darkens the Mediterranean sunlight. “I am made of blue sky and golden light, and I will feel this way forever,” intones the husky female voice-over. Then a hunky man magically appears and dives into her pool — no sexual overtones there.

Chanel No. 5 is just a perfume, but Scott’s visual magic is used to associate the brand with an intoxicating mix of power, lust, and wealth. You’ll never be as sexy as Catherine Deneuve, but you can go out on the town smelling like her, and that’s kind of like being made of blue sky and golden light, I guess?

It’s perversely appropriate that one of the people responsible for creating the visual language of luxury brand capitalism helms House of Gucci. “We’re not aristocrats,” says Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver). In the late ’70s, the Gucci fortune was only a couple of generations old, but patriarch Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) is instantly contemptuous when he finds out his son’s new girlfriend Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) comes from the petite bourgeois. Maurizio is in law school when he meets Patrizia at a party, and he has no intention of entering the chaotic family business. Rodolfo and his more competent brother Aldo (Al Pacino) believe Maurizio will be the future of the company, mostly because Aldo’s son Paolo (Jared Leto) is an idiot, which is why Rodolfo instantly pegs Patrizia as a gold digger. When he insists on marrying her, the groom’s side of the church is conspicuously empty, and Maurizio is forced to take a job at the Reggiani’s trucking company. (“Trucking? Mafia!” hisses Rodolfo.)

Patrizia’s not a gold digger, in that she sincerely loves Maurizio, but she’s not not a gold digger, either. Once she has the ring on her finger, the steel starts to show behind the velvet. Maurizio would be content with a fairly normal career, but Patrizia pushes him to be more ambitious. When Aldo calls to reconcile the Gucci rift, she’s adamant they return to the fold. Then she promptly starts maneuvering to put Paolo out of the picture.

Patrizia is an infamous figure in Italy, known as “the Black Widow” for ordering a hit on Maurizio in 1995. Lady Gaga plays her with what I can only describe as gusto. She and Scott know this is melodrama of the highest sort. When Patrizia and Maurizio have a tryst in his father’s office, it starts out sexy but devolves into a kind of slapstick ferocity. Driver seems to understand exactly the level of soap opera acting this story needs and delivers it nonchalantly. I suppose it’s hard not to wink into the camera when you’re doing a GQ cover shoot scene. Pacino, Leto, and Irons go full Dark Shadows. I wouldn’t call any of the Italian accents “great,” but they’re at least fun, like when an unrecognizable Leto bleats “She shake-a my hand while she knife-a me in the back!”

It’s corny as all hell, but it’s also pretty entertaining because you can tell these folks are having a good time. Scott’s lighting design is off the charts good, especially in an early Italo-disco sequence where he goes gaga with a light-up dance floor. His foreshadowing of the climactic murder is constant. When Patrizia confronts Maurizio’s mistress at a ski lodge, she barrels into the shot in a blood-red, skin-tight ski suit. Thanks to the ’70s Italian characters smoking like very fashionable chimneys, House of Gucci uses the mister as much as Blade Runner.

Ultimately, House of Gucci falls victim to the same problems Ridley Scott films have been having since Gladiator. There are a lot of good scenes that work on their own, but they never gel together into something greater than their sum. For example, Maurizio doesn’t drift away from Patrizia; he just seems to see another woman he likes and jumps ship. After luxuriating in Italian villas for two hours, the life-or-death drama at the end seems perfunctory. Like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, Lady Gaga’s portrayal of the antihero Patrizia is so charismatic and seductive that it undermines the film’s supposed deeper themes of the corrupting power of greed. The whole package comes across a little like The Godfather, if everyone involved were just a little stupider. I guess there will always be an appetite for watching awful people behaving awfully.

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Film Features Film/TV

A Star Is Born

When David Bowie met Cameron Crowe, then an 18-year-old writer who had been assigned to interview the superstar for Rolling Stone, he had this advice: “Don’t expect to find the real me, the David Jones underneath all this.”
From the outside, Bowie had it all in 1975: He was the toast of Los Angeles, the biggest music star of the decade, who had just finished filming his first starring movie role in The Man Who Fell to Earth, and he was about to embark on a world tour. But really, he was a man on the verge of physical and psychic collapse, living on cocaine, whole milk, and red peppers (to stave off scurvy), unable to trust anyone or enjoy anything. He was hollowed out by fame.

When we meet Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) in A Star Is Born, he isn’t that far gone yet, but he has broken the “handful of pills and gin before stage time” barrier. His dad rock stylings are still filling ampitheatres and earning him choice festival slots. But he can’t get no satisfaction, and the nagging feeling that he should be having fun makes him want to smash up a few pills with his cowboy boot and snort the powder.

Bradley Cooper (left) and Lady Gaga shine in the Cooper-directed remake of A Star Is Born.

Adrift after a successful show, he wanders into a drag bar for a nightcap and stumbles upon the find of his life. Ally (Lady Gaga) is a waitress, just off her shift, who performs with the voice and stage presence of … well, Lady Gaga. It’s pretty much love at first sight for Jackson, but Ally is wary. She’s a working-class Long Island girl who knows a spiraling drunk when she sees one.

Their long first night, which takes up at least 20 percent of A Star Is Born‘s running time, is the best part of the picture. Cooper is one of the few capital-M Movie Stars we have left here in the ruins of the 21st century, and Gaga’s secret weapon is the decade she spent in acting classes at the Lee Strasberg institute. Their chemistry is deep, and Cooper, who also directed, luxuriates on the details of their budding bad romance. After she punches a cop (it’s a hell of a first date), they write a song together in a grocery store parking lot. Then, he’s back on the road, and she’s back home with her crusty limo driver dad (Andrew Dice Clay) and her job waiting tables.

But Jackson isn’t ready to let it go, and he sends his driver to whisk her away from the restaurant floor and onto the stage at his next concert, where they sing their first duet. A Star Is Born has now been remade three times, and this sequence is the essence of the story’s appeal. A talented unknown is whisked from obscurity and elevated instantly to the height of success, without the intervening years of struggle and disappointment that Stefani Germanotta went through before becoming Lady Gaga.

The character trajectories for Ally and Jackson form a perfect X: She starts low and ends up high, while he does exactly the opposite. Cooper is at his best, subdued, subtle, without any of the mugging he sneaks into David O. Russell films. Gaga is both unmannered and layered. Like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, she knows on some level that this is all going to end badly, but she can’t help herself. It certainly helps the progression of the story that Cooper is a passable belter at best, while Gaga sings with surgical precision.

This is high melodrama of a kind rarely seen these days, or executed this well at any time. Cooper’s direction shows an unexpectedly deft hand, even if he does linger a little too long on his own character’s final downfall. He and cinematographer Matthew Libatique have been watching a lot of Kubrick, with strict, symmetrical compositions popping up at key moments in the story. Ally is introduced in the center of a series of vanishing point shots, so she appears to have lines of pent up energy radiating from her. Later, when she and Jackson perform their first duet, they’re framed with angelic lens flare halos.

A Star Is Born is always the meta-story of fame as conceived in the time it is made. For Judy Garland in 1954, that meant success in MGM musicals. For Lady Gaga, it’s Bonnaroo, Coachella, and Red Rocks. We already know how this meta ends: Lady Gaga becomes a superstar. What the woman who achieved immortality by bungee jumping into the Super Bowl understands is that her fans (represented here by the drag performers she started out with) want to see the “real person” beneath the meat dress. And so she puts on an uncanny front of vulnerability in her first starring role. I suspect Stefani Germanotta and David Jones would have had some very interesting conversations.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Christina71087 | Dreamstime.com

People crack me up. Really, when I see some people, my skin starts to crack up. Well, not really. But for the love of all the things in this world that I couldn’t care less about — fancy furniture, quitting smoking, keeping a spotless house, who has the best nachos, whether there are billboards in Germantown,
anything that comes out of John McCain’s mouth, riding a unicycle, doing yard work, shopping, Zydeco music, sending Christmas cards, ever setting foot again in the Atlanta airport (well, I do care about that because I’d rather be forced to look at naked photos of John McCain), other people’s dreams, people’s photos of their kids and vacations, video games, action movies, donuts, Lady Gaga, those people on Duck Dynasty, any reality television show, gun rights, exercise, and a whole slew of other things the thought of which makes me yawn — there are just some people who defy explanation.

Christina71087 | Dreamstime.com

Lady Gaga

I just read about Trinity United Methodist Church in Midtown getting a citation for allowing six homeless people to spend the night there because the church doesn’t occupy at least five acres, and I am fairly baffled. I’m baffled as to why a church needs to sit on five acres of land to allow a handful of homeless people to have a hot meal and a good night’s sleep. Who came up with that ordinance and why five acres? It’s not like they are going to be out there farming or horseback riding. They are just inside, where it’s warm, resting, and not bothering anyone. I think I’m even more baffled by the people who don’t think homeless people should be helped in residential neighborhoods. Personally, I don’t think SUVs with private school stickers should be allowed in residential neighborhoods. But that’s just me.

I have an idea for helping the homeless that has been keeping me up at night. I’ll never have the money to make this idea happen, so I’m going to toss it out there. I’m sure there will be plenty of comments posted later telling me that I have the IQ of an eggplant, but I couldn’t care less about them either.

I think someone needs to buy the old French Quarter Inn in Overton Square and turn it into a really chic, contemporary boutique hotel and have it all operated by homeless men and women, only they wouldn’t be homeless anymore because they would live there too. At least for a time until they saved enough money from their new jobs to get their own houses or apartments.

The hotel would be named SHELTER. Formerly homeless employees would move in and start going through a training program. Counseling and other services would be available. All employees would be provided with uniforms just like any other hotel, only they would be very stylish, and they would have access to free dry cleaning and laundry services. Of course, some of them would work in dry cleaning and laundry services, just like any other hotel.

SHELTER would have a warm but modern restaurant named the Soup Kitchen, and the menu would focus on seasonal gourmet soups, maybe eight different ones a day and some mainstays, and they would be served with various crostini, salads, and small plates. There couldn’t be a bar because alcohol and homelessness don’t mesh too well in lots of cases. But it would be a really nice restaurant, and who wouldn’t want to go to a restaurant that specialized in soups? I wish there was one of those, in any case. All of the hotel staff would have breakfast together every morning and discuss the plans for the day. Guests would be treated like they would at any ritzy hotel, down to the last detail.

The marketing plans for SHELTER would be geared toward socially conscious travelers who, I think, would love to stay in a hotel like this and would pay above-average rates knowing they were helping support this cause. And it would be, after all, right there in Overton Square, where there is so much to do and so many places to eat and drink. But the hotel would also offer live entertainment for its guests and for regulars. Memphis can’t seem to get it together and have one club dedicated to just jazz, so maybe it could become known for its live jazz.

As new employees came on board, the seasoned, formerly homeless employees would mentor and train them. In essence, they would feel a sense of ownership in the hotel. Of course, all of this would have to be a nonprofit entity and operate through grants and other funding sources for some time until the hotel became self-sustaining, like many nonprofit organizations. It could collaborate with other for-profit hotels. There would be a board of directors to oversee and guide the project, but essentially the staff would make most of the important decisions and definitely run the day-to-day operations without much oversight after a while.

Think about it. If you were traveling to another city and making your plans and you ran across a high-quality website that showed a beautiful hotel in the middle of a vibrant entertaining and dining district and you saw that it was a nonprofit operated by formerly homeless people, wouldn’t you want to stay there? I know I would.

Now, someone with some loot make this happen and make it a model for other cities and let this be one more good thing for which Memphis is known. As far as I can tell, no one has done this yet.