The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Tuesday, December 4, 2018 — 5

MGM

FILM SERIES

I’m 
not 
quite 
sure 
how 
one could possibly put a sour 
spin on the illustrious and 
stunning masterpiece that is 
“A Star is Born.” Truly, though, 
it would be a flat-out lie to 
pretend that “Shallow” and its 
hauntingly-beautiful lyrics are 
not permanently playing on a 
loop in our heads ever since 
the big screen went dark. With 
breathtaking performances from 
Bradley Cooper (“War Dogs”) 
and 
Lady 
Gaga 
(“American 
Horror Story: Hotel”), a spine-
chillingly-killer 
soundtrack 
and a tone of authenticity that 
prevails throughout, “A Star is 
Born” is an electric knockout 
(and it better win a damn Oscar). 
The 
film’s 
portrayal 
of 
what appears to be such a 
real romance speaks volumes 
to 
the 
technology-saturated 
generations of today. Jack’s 
question of whether Ally is 
“happy in this modern world,” 
or 
“need(s) 
more” 
ripples 
through the minds of millennial 
and Gen Z viewers alike. We 
ponder Jack’s throaty lyrics, 
wondering 
if 
perhaps, 
in 
today’s social-media and tech-
overdosed world, we do need 
more than Tinder “dates” and 
raunchy, late night “u-ups.” The 
film perfectly resonates with an 
audience that feels nostalgic for 
a time they never knew, a time 
when romance was concrete, 
raw, built on genuine connection 
and, well, not dead.
Let’s rewind to Jack and Ally’s 
written-in-the-stars 
meet-
cute at the drag bar. Jack’s first 
encounter with Ally is one where 
she doesn’t know he is watching. 
She is in her zone. Performing 
at her local bar, Ally radiates a 
relaxed, yet sexy sophistication 
and 
intensity 
that 
Jack 
is 
enticed by almost immediately. 
Right from the start, Jack is 
introduced to the real Ally. 
This first meeting is unsullied 
by superficial impressions from 
profile pictures or bio captions, 
and instead, Jack and Ally are 
introduced to one another in 

their natural states, Jack slow-
talking and buzzed off more 
than a few drinks and Ally 
performing 
an 
enchanting 
rendition of “La Vie en Rose.” 
Cooper’s 
superb 
directing 
weaves this same vibe of realness 
throughout the remainder of the 
film, hooking us into a love so 
outstanding and wondrous, we 
swear it is from another time. 
Following the evolution of Jack 
and Ally’s relationship from 
their initial run-in at the bar 
to their ridiculously charming 
gas station non-date to their 
cross-country 
road-tripping 
adventures and finally, to their 
married life, our fascination 
with 
their 
otherworldly 
chemistry and music continues 
to grow, ultimately reaching its 
peak with Jack’s gut-wrenching 
death. As our tears, or rather, 
our sobs, echo through the 
theater walls, we can’t help 
but glorify Cooper’s directing 
chops and say a prayer of thanks 
for the gift that is Lady Gaga’s 
vocal chords. By the end of 
this film, a realization that we 
could never have known hours 
before sets in: We may never 
be ready for another movie-
romance because this one was 
just that good. Like Ally, we 
find ourselves believing that 
we too may “never love again.” 
And once “A Star is Born” enters 
on-demand streaming, we may 
never have to. 
— Samantha Nelson, 
Daily Arts Writer

***

Hesitant after the impression 
the trailer of Bradley Cooper’s 
“A Star is Born” had left, I asked 
a male friend: Does the film 
imply a woman needs a man 
to succeed? He paused briefly, 
before answering, “no.”
Hesitant after realizing I had 
asked a male friend a question 
about gender relations, I asked a 
female friend the same question. 
She paused slightly longer, but 
also answered, “no.”

Little did I know that the 
question I should have been 
asking all along went something 
more like, “Does the film imply 
that for a female star to be born, 
a male star has to die?” Given 
that each of the four iterations of 
“A Star is Born” stay loyal to this 
detail, apparently the answer is, 
“yes.”
I 
cannot 
withhold 
Lady 
Gaga’s 
due 
praise 
for 
her 
portrayal 
of 
Ally. 
With 
a 
commanding 
performance, 
she manages to seize control 
of every scene — perhaps even 
ones she wasn’t supposed to 
dominate. That paired with 
her and Cooper’s chemistry 
makes for an unconventionally 
balanced love story in terms of 
how it treats each respective 
lover as independent though 
their stories may intertwine.
But “A Star is Born” has to 
be held to more than its acting 
performances. It’s yet another 
instance of Hollywood’s raging 
reboot fever, so it is also about 
the stories we consider worth 
retelling, as well as how we go 
about retelling them.
Every “Star” has been about 
stars, of course. The near-
century 
of 
remakes 
would 
suggest the story continues 
to 
allow 
insight 
into 
the 
entertainment 
industry. 
However, the latest iteration 
hardly ever averts its eyes from 
the leads, so the film lacks the 
contextualization 
that 
could 
help not only justify the remake 
but also help it say something 
new.
Instead, the main strategy 
Cooper’s version employs to 
modernize the story are minute 
reversals 
of 
gender-based 
injustices. For example, Cooper’s 
character 
Jack 
expresses 
a 
fetishistic 
appreciation 
for 
Gaga’s character Ally’s nose 
after she reveals it barred her 
from success in the industry. 
In another scene, Ally throws a 
punch at an overbearing fan in 
defense of Jack.
But the film remains loyal to 

Irreconcilable differences: ‘A Star is Born’ divides

other formulae, many of which 
yield disconcerting biproducts. 
From 1937 to the present day, 
every time the female star 
is born, the male star dies. 
Regardless of whether that male 
star is self-destructive, a female 
cannot seem to rise without 
causing her man to fall.
Which brings me to my last 
point (Can I say it? I have to 
say it): I’m tired of love stories 
— formulaic ones. Love stories 
that seek to gratify audiences 
with hasty marriages rather 
than questioning our reliance 
on a flawed institution, that 
prescribe 
romance 
as 
the 
ultimate 
form 
of 
intimacy 
between a man and a woman, 
that ask us to go gaga over 
another white, heterosexual, 
cisgender couple.
No matter how many minute 
reversals 
accumulate, 
these 
larger tropes make 2018’s “A 
Star is Born” the same old song 
and story. It might not be worth 
retelling.
— Julianna Morano, 
Daily Arts Writer

***

This fourth edition of the 
well-trodden, 
self-destructive 

musician story leads off with 
a powerful 45 minutes. Held 
up by a great one-two punch 
performance 
form 
Bradley 
Cooper as the vodka-guzzling, 
fallen-star 
Jackson 
Maine, 
and Lady Gaga as the industry 
newcomer Ally, the film’s first 
act is an affecting road movie 
about two characters who act 
as each other’s moments of 
salvation. The relationship is 
inviting, though fraught, and 
has just enough sour to it to 
breathe the mustard-gas breath 
of what’s to come. “A Star is 
Born” first finds its strength in 
the two characters it presents, 
and only begins to lose its way 
when it forgets that. 
As soon as Gaga’s Ally signs 
a record deal, as soon as she 
begins her own musical journey, 
the plot then somewhat split 
between the characters, the 
film’s texture begins to slip 
away. Quickly, “A Star is Born” 
becomes a movie about self-
destructive tropes instead of a 
movie about the two characters 
who had grabbed our attention 
so far. The last hour or so 
focuses, then, on how the two 
drift apart, how the rifts of 
career and pride tear rifts in 
their household. It would be 

wrong to say that the film isn’t 
allowed to be sad, instead my 
criticism would be that the film 
doesn’t seem interested in being 
anything else. Sometimes the 
visceral reaction you get from 
a movie like “A Star is Born” is 
conflated with abject quality 
in the work of art. The film is 
difficult and sad through and 
through, but I’d closer classify it 
as a work in grief-porn than as a 
terrific piece of cinema.
The 
dissociation 
of 
the 
characters in “A Star is Born” 
is interesting, as it shows how 
a movie can lose itself when it 
puts its themes in front of the 
characters that are supposed 
to carry them. The second 
and third acts of “A Star is 
Born” could have been out of 
any movie about a troubled, 
alcohol-abusing musician in a 
relationship — and that’s not a 
good thing. It’s understandable 
that the film wanted to see 
itself as two halves — building 
the relationship up, and then 
tearing it back down — but in 
order for it to do that properly, 
in order to turn those two halves 
into a whole, it has to feel like it’s 
the same movie the entire time. 
— Stephen Satarino, 
Daily Arts Writer

Irreconcilable Differences is a format where we talk about movies that we just can’t decide on. Is it good? Is it bad? What are its merits as a 
work of cinema? Irreconcilable Differences is meant to be read with some knowledge of the film in question and a strong set of opinions. 

BOOK REVIEW

“I Might Regret This” is 
the kind of book that doesn’t 
come along very often. Freshly 
heartbroken from her first love, 
Abbi Jacobson — of “Broad 
City” fame — sets out to drive 
from New York to Los Angeles, 
hoping the change of pace and 
scenery would both distract 
her and give her insight. The 

book she wrote about this 
experience isn’t literary in any 
traditional sense; it’s not really 
about language or plot. Instead, 
it’s messy and rambling. It feels 
unedited in the best way.
“I Might Regret This” takes 
a few chapters to settle into. 
Jacobson throws convention 
out 
the 
window, 
and 
it’s 
sometimes hard to keep up 
with the breakneck pace of 
her mind. At one point, for 
example, 
Jacobson 
recalls 
filming “6 Balloons” and being 
unable to hit breakaway glass 
with a set of keys, and while 
she has explaining this she’s 
in a field in Southern Utah in 
the middle of the night, and 
somehow the whole time she’s 
been joking about a wooden 
buffalo 
keychain 
and 
Hot 

Pockets and her reckless alter 
ego, Babbi.
A few pages earlier, Jacobson 
lists “A few thoughts on the 
1997 film ‘My Best Friend’s 
Wedding,’” the first of which is: 
“How was Julia Roberts such 
a respected and feared food 
critic by the age of twenty-
seven? Is this possible?” She 
contemplates 
later, 
“Maybe 
hotels 
put 
out 
so 
many 
different-size towels so you 
have lots of options to cover up 
light sources in the middle of 
the night.”
This writing style is both 
thrilling 
and 
frustrating. 
Much 
like 
when 
viewing 
“Broad City,” part of the joy 
of reading “I Might Regret 
This” is the scramble to follow 
along with the barrage of jokes 
and moments of clarity. By 
the second half of the book, 
though, Jacobson settles into a 
more contemplative voice, and 
it’s the sections at the end of 
the book that elevate “I Might 
Regret This” from a playful, 
frenzied romp across America 
to a truly exceptional memoir.
The turning point comes 
during 
a 
strip 
mall 
aura 
reading in Sedona (of course), 
when Jacobson breaks down 
crying. “This part of myself I’d 
been trying to hide, the thing 
I avoided communicating to 
anyone: that I might be right 
back where I started, unlovable 
and unable to love,” she writes. 
“But I gave them five stars on 
Yelp, because … damn.”
On the drive from Sedona 
to Jerome, Ariz., Jacobson 
catalogues the best bagels of 
her life. Like almost everything 

in “I Might Regret This,” the 
list is really about love, in all 
its iterations and peculiarities, 
and 
about 
the 
interplay 
between love and identity — 
how over and over love makes 
and remakes us, through its 
absence as well as its presence.
Jacobson 
writes 
fondly 
about The Bagel Factory, where 
she hung out in high school and 
which provided “the perfect 
food for the past version of 
myself that wore headscarves 
and operated at peak weed 
consumption.” 
College-
era Hidden Bean Bagels are 
a 
conduit 
for 
Jacobson’s 
memories of riding the bus 
alone from Baltimore to New 
York City every weekend: “I’d 
stare out the window listening 
to 
music, 
chomping 
on 
a 
cinnamon raisin bagel with 
butter I’d grabbed from the 
cafe for the ride. Soon I would 
step off the bus on my own, in 
the most interesting place in 
the whole world.”
Jacobson is tuned into the 
ways that physical objects, 
details, smells and tastes shape 
the bigger things in our lives. 
Our loves, our insecurities, our 
heartbreaks, our griefs: She 
understands that these things 
are 
intricately 
constructed, 
that their incongruities and 
moments of humor lend them 
texture and weight. The ability 
to understand that sadness 
and joy and ridiculousness 
are necessarily intertwined: 
This is what has always made 
Jacobson’s comedy so tenderly 
funny. Like “Broad City,” “I 
Might Regret This” is in a 
league of its own.

‘I Might Regret This’ an 
exciting, original memoir
Over Thanksgiving break I 
watched “Sorry to Bother You,” 
Boots Riley’s absurdist, amazing 
directorial 
debut. 
After 
the 
movie was over, I scoured the 
internet for takes — my jaw still 
dropped — and landed on A.O. 
Scott’s New York Times write-
up. In the review the film critic 
claims “If Mike Judge’s ‘Office 
Space’ 
and 
Robert 
Downey 
Sr.’s ‘Putney Swope’ hooked 
up after a night of bingeing on 
hallucinogens, Marxist theory 
and the novels of Paul Beatty and 
Colson Whitehead, the offspring 
might look something like this.”
That’s a loaded critique, but 
upon reading it I had a gratifying 
realization: I’ve read Paul Beatty 
and Colson Whitehead. That’s 
right; I, Mr. Scott, understand 
your reference, for I am an 
English major, which instills in 
me the ability to find thematic 
threads between Beatty’s “The 
Sellout” and Whitehead’s “The 
Underground 
Railroad” 
and, 
most crucially, formulate an 
intertextual framework to then 
contextualize “Sorry to Bother 
You.”
As we enter the holiday season, 
I should recognize that grappling 
with everything I’ve read in the 
course of my studies as an English 
Language & Literature major 
at the University — analyzing, 
discussing, writing about it — is 
the gift that keeps on giving, a 
yearly routine of Big Intellectual 
Shit.
There comes a time in your 
academic career — for me it 
took two full years — when you 
need to narrow your educational 
concentration 
and 
make 
a 
decision on your major. This is 
a choice that definitely won’t 
pigeonhole you into an industry 
for at least the first three to 
five years of your professional 

life, structurally limiting your 
personal growth for a formative 
portion of your young adult 
experience.
In any case, opting to study 
English signals a distinct turn at 
an otherwise universal fork in 
the road, and its consequences 
are one millionfold. For one, you 
never need to lug a calculator 
around, a major relief because 
the emotional baggage of lugging 

around one of those beautiful, 
burdensome 
TI-Nspires 
can 
surpass the real breakdown you 
experience when you see actual 
numbers on a Scantron exam. 
Instead your precious cargo 
comes in the form of Norton 
Anthologies, which make you 
look sophisticated enough and 
also justify a formidable amount 
of physical working space at 
library tables. Perhaps most 
importantly, majoring in English 
gives you more credence to make 
sweeping, sappy claims that 
studying English makes you a 
better person, which is exactly 
what I’m doing right now.
You see, I operate at a 
wavelength far more complex 
than that which is given meaning 
by 
programming 
languages 
like Python, C++, Java, because 
software 
engineers 
can’t 
possibly comprehend what it’s 

like 
to 
establish 
characters 
that 
flip 
binaries, 
or 
use 
language that subverts image, 
or splice narratives with split 
temporalities existing on the 
same timeline. I think.
Elevated thought, I’m aware. 
Thanks to such a critically-
thinking 
background, 
I 
can 
defuse 
the 
grandparents 
at 
Thanksgiving who ask about 
postgrad plans for the fourth 
time in one conversation despite 
insistence that no, Grandma, 
I don’t think I’d have much 
common 
discussion 
material 
with your book club friend who 
specializes in private equity, 
because I don’t know what 
private equity means, but I can 
tell you about how Peter Barry’s 
notions of the post-structuralist 
inform my takeaway on your own 
standards of post-professional 
life.
I’ll have you know, Grandma, 
that over the years I’ve listened to 
a handful of professors say things 
that very much changed the way 
I think about learning itself. 
When you reinvent your own 
foundations, you work from the 
ground up to create a new outlook 
altogether, 
and 
the 
results 
are 
(initially 
uncomfortable) 
rewarding gravy. We don’t know 
much about anything at this stage 
of existence, so taking unfamiliar 
risks only makes sense.
Besides, 
I 
get 
to 
walk 
out of class feeling smarter, 
better equipped for a range of 
dialogues, and eager to, um, do 
my homework most of the time. 
Not to mention, of course, the 
social upside: When all else fails 
conversationally, 
you 
always 
have the patented English major, 
“yeah, it’s really cool, don’t know 
what I’m going to do with it once 
I graduate though (haha).” A real 
laughing matter.

Big intellectual

DAILY HEALTH & WELLNESS COLUMN

JOEY 
SCHUMAN

MIRIAM FRANCISCO
Daily Arts Writer

“I Might 
Regret This”

Abbi Jacobson

Grand Central 
Publishing

Oct. 30, 2018