We just wanted to take another look at A Star is Born.

Pop CultureFebruary 7, 2019

Two superfans on why you need to watch A Star is Born

Staff writers

We just wanted to take another look at A Star is Born.

It’s nominated for a bunch of Oscars, it’s the most memed film of last year, and you can finally watch it from the comfort of your living room via Lightbox now. Superfans Alex Casey and Sam Brooks discuss why A Star is Born is the best film ever made.

A Star is Born is available on Lightbox now.

Alex Casey: Okay. The time has come. You can now watch A Star is Born whenever, wherever, and as many times as your credit card will allow. I’m obsessed. How does one even begin to describe the many, many layers of Lady Gaga’s first big screen role, Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut?

Sam Brooks: It’s a love story. Between a man of indeterminate age and a girl in her thirties, between a man and country music, between a man and his brother, between a girl and her lover’s butt, between Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. It’s where Bradley Cooper, believing himself to a be a heterosexual visionary, remakes a story that has previously starred both Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland with Lady Gaga.

How many times have you seen it?

Once in the cinema and once at home. Honestly feels dangerous that it’s so readily available now, truly I’m off the deep end (of the couch) watch as I dive in (to the TV). My first question for you is this: how does one create the perfect A Star Is Born viewing environment?

When I first saw it, it was at the media screening where my fellow Borner (my name for A Star is Born superfans) and I had snuck up to the fancy Gold Class seats and reclined. When I watched it yesterday, I was lying in bed with half my face on a pillow.

I honestly think the ideal viewing situation won’t happen for another decade, where people can sit and recite the best lines along with the film, Rocky Horror Picture Show style.

It’s gone straight to the special place in my heart reserved for the first Twilight film. So fun, so quotable. I’m thinking a midnight screening at The Hollywood complete with dress-ups and free donuts to throw at the screen.

Can we talk about some of the best lines in this movie? I would like to nominate “If you don’t dig into your fuckin’ soul, you won’t have legs,” ideally muttered in a low growl in front of a large CGI billboard.

For me, it’s “I’m gonna be thinking about your nose for a very long time.” Or Halsey’s all-time line, “How great.”

I see that and I raise you Alec Baldwin’s “Ladies and gentlemen… Ally.”

How about ‘Hi Ally, I’m Gail’, from the queen that is Gail, the road manager?

I am also a huge fan of the exchange between Jackson and the pompous manager man while they are waiting for Ally to stop whingeing in the bathtub while dressed as literally a Betty Spaghetti:

“No drink.”

“No socks.”

“Touché.”

And it’s less a quote and more a lyric but, “Why you come round here with an ass like that?” is something that I would consider tattooing on my lower back. Speaking of which, what’s your favourite song from the soundtrack, not including the dialogue tracks?

I am such a goddamn sucker for ‘Always Remember Us This Way.’ I particularly enjoy the lyrics “Lovers in the night / Poets trying to write / We don’t know how to rhyme / But, damn, we try.”

It’s literally a stone’s throw from your Uncle leaning over with a beer and going “I’m a poet and I don’t even know it!” and also the way she pronounces “damn” like DOMMM is enchanting.

I’m low-key obsessed with ‘Heal Me’, because it sounds exactly like Gaga’s 2017 single ‘The Cure’, which contributes to my conspiracy theory that all the pop songs were originally written for an album that has yet to materialise, and then she got cast in this, and so she used them for this instead. Also, it’s just a really lovely song that’s barely even in the movie.

We’re burying the lede. We need to talk about the first time they sing ‘Shallow’ live.

It’s honestly the best part of the movie – I could watch that scene forever. The moment where she makes the decision to go out onstage made me cry in the movies all three times and my bed once.

I completely agree. Love when Ally covers her eyes when she does the first big belt-out bit, love when Jackson encouragingly mouths “I find myself longing”, love that the video of it I just watched is uploaded to a channel called ‘Middle Aged Women Fan Club’

But what I love even more is now that we get to enjoy it playing out again and again in real life, like when Bradley Cooper got pulled onstage at Gaga’s Vegas show. He absolutely tanks it, has absolutely no idea what to do, and starts doing super meek air guitar. Honestly, he should have just peed. When in doubt, pee it out.

I can’t believe it took us this long to get to the pee. I have so many thoughts, feelings and philosophies about that scene. How many times did they film it? If that actually happened, it would be an international news story immediately and we never hear about it again afterwards? Do you think he actually peed? If not, what was the contraption used to make Bradley Cooper look like he peed himself? Was it CGI?

I would wager that he actually peed. He seems like that type of guy. Based on my extensive pee-search, I have found that both Shania Twain and Fergie have peed themselves on stage in the past. There’s also that scene where they have just eaten breakfast and Jackson picks up a giggling Ally and carries her back to bed. I SWEAR when they are rolling around he goes “the toast is going to come out” Does he mean he is about to crap on the bed? Is Jackson Maine a serial pooper and pee-er? All signs point to ‘yes’.

You heard it here first: Bradley Cooper, Method Pee-er. I remember us talking way back in October, when hope was young, about the most ridiculous scene in the film: the one where he smashes a pill with his gumboot.

Cowboy boot, surely.

My sincerest apologies – he crushes a pill with his cowboy boot, puts it in a glass of whiskey and downs it in one. Sometimes symbols just get in the way, and I’m glad that Bradley Cooper as a director knows that.

I would also like to table another one of my favourite scenes: Jackson slowly smooshing a donut all over Ally’s face when she finds out she’s got a record deal. At first, I was annoyed because it seemed like a tremendous waste of a donut, but I like how she scolds “Jaaack-son” in the exact same cadence as the owner scolds Denver the guilty dog.

If nothing else, A Star is Born is the kind of film that is full of iconic scenes that make up the two and a half hours. I know that’s a big call: a movie full of scenes. But let me be the first one to put it down on paper: A Star is Born has Some Scenes.

You know what else it delivers on? Stars. Many stars. Yuge stars. Drag stars. Kiwi stars. One of the biggest stars in the ASIB universe doesn’t even make it on screen – Willie Nelson. When Bobby Maine randomly show up backstage at SNL (I feel like there are no security guards in this world?) he casually mentions that he just got back from being on tour “with Willie”. Now THAT is a road movie I would watch. Oh god, I already want to watch it again.

I just… I just love this movie, Alex. From when Gaga starts singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ right at the start, to when Gaga sings about her lover’s butt, to when Gaga sings about never saying goodbye, I love it. The best moments make me cry, and the most unintentionally funny moments genuinely make me laugh – and we haven’t even mentioned Sam Elliott’s voice or the way he cries when he drives away from the house.

OR THE DOG! The poor, beautiful dog.

I’m done. Going to go watch it again now.

You can watch A Star is Born on Lightbox right here. Rentals start at $6.99.

Keep going!

A screenshot from Xbox exclusive Crackdown 3.

Pop CultureFebruary 7, 2019

Crackdown 3: Better late than never

Lee Henaghan

Guest writer

A screenshot from Xbox exclusive Crackdown 3.

Crackdown 3 is one of the most notoriously delayed games of all time, but it’s finally out next week. Lee Henaghan caught up with the game’s top creative talent to find out if it’s going to be worth the wait.

With the possible exception of Hollywood, there is no industry more obsessed and fixated on release dates than the world of video games.

As soon as a new title is announced, usually years in advance, the countdown begins. Often releases are targeted as vaguely as “Summer 2019”, or even just “2019” to give developers and publishers as much wiggle room as possible to get their game out of the gate.

As the hype builds, however, so does the pressure from fans and retailers for a definitive street date, and that’s when the pressure really ramps up. Marketing campaigns, studio budgets and years’ worth of release schedules are built around big games hitting the shelves on time, and if there are any delays, it doesn’t take long for the online rumour mill to crank up looking for any signs of trouble.

Crackdown 3, originally announced in 2014, is probably the most delayed game of the current console generation, if not of all time. Its development has been beset by controversy, studio restructures and back-to-the-drawing-board moments. At some points, it seemed as if it might not come out at all. But five years later, the game is finally ready for release and we’re just days from finding out if it’s been worth the wait.

As the godfather of gaming Shigeru Miyamoto once said: “A delayed game is eventually good. A bad game is bad forever.” By stubbornly refusing to release a major exclusive that didn’t meet its expectations, Xbox has both disappointed impatient fans and raised expectations for a game that at this stage, needs to be pretty special to justify the pushbacks.

Creative director Joseph Staten was keen to emphasise that the rocky road to release was a result of lofty ambitions and a refusal to compromise on the team’s original vision. “We set big goals for ourselves,” he said.

“The project began with the basic pitch of ‘What if we harnessed the power of the cloud to create fully destructible environments – and what if we did that with Crackdown?’ Those are some pretty big ‘what ifs’ and the truth is, it just took longer than we thought,” Staten said.

By all accounts, Crackdown 3’s ambitious reliance on cloud-based computing is the main reason for its late arrival. It would normally take twelve Xbox Ones to process the physics calculations behind the environmental destruction in Wrecking Zone (the game’s multiplayer mode). Instead, all this number crunching and heavy lifting is done by Microsoft’s Azure server farms, which theoretically frees up more processing power at your end to focus on graphics.

As head of production Jorg Neumann puts it: “Cloud destruction is something that’s brand new. It’s never really been done before at this level, so it was difficult to set up. Any time you do something first in the industry, it’s hard.”

As well as the new technology, developers had to get to grips with an entirely new way of thinking when creating Crackdown 3’s open-world sandbox. “Any multiplayer game is primarily about predictable geometry. This piece of cover and that line of sight is always going to be there so you can predict the flow of combat,” said Staten.

“Once you’re able to blow up the entire world, all these tried and true design principals go out of the window so it wasn’t just the technical hill we had to climb. We had to completely rethink what it is to be a PvP combat experience – so many things had to be relearned.”

Although the cloud cover caused plenty of delays, one silver lining was the extended time it gave the team to polish other aspects of the game. Although the single-player campaign doesn’t feature the same level of destructible environments, its non-linear story and increased focus on verticality created an entirely different kind of Crackdown.

“As we knew we had to keep pushing on Wrecking Zone to wrangle the technology, it gave us extra time to polish the campaign, to invest more in the story and deepen the experience,” Staten said. “Delays are never fun for anybody but in this case the campaign benefited from it.”

In the nine years since Crackdown 2 was released, open-world action games have become bigger, more cinematic and more immersive than ever before. Despite this, Staten is happy that his team remained focused on making a game that was true to the Crackdown formula rather than following current trends.

“Job number one was to make a Crackdown game that Crackdown fans would love. We’ve introduced some new features and tools to make things more accessible and give [players] more guidance,” Staten said.

“Frankly though, a lot of modern open world games right now can be kind of exhausting with all the layers of map detail. The worlds become so big they actually end up keeping you on a more linear path to guide you through. We experimented but felt ‘that’s not really Crackdown’. We want the story to follow you wherever you go and support the choices the player makes.”

Crackdown has always been about chaos and over-the-top mayhem, and the third instalment doubles down on it, particularly when it comes to taking down the game’s rival gangs and factions.

“If you’re familiar with Grand Theft Auto’s star system where law enforcement gets angry with you, that’s also true in Crackdown,” Staten said. “Any faction can retaliate against you anywhere in the world. As you get stronger as an agent and level up your skills, the stronger the retaliations get. And it’s not just a cop car pulling up, it’s mechs falling out of the sky, mole machines burrowing up from underground, aerial bombardments peppering the ground.”

The non-linear nature of the game’s storyline means you can tackle the final boss straight out of the gate if you’re brave enough. Unlike previous Crackdown games, gangs will also encroach on each other’s turf if you rile them up enough.

“In the original game, if you went to a particular part of the island and took out a gang, the enemies were contained to that part of the island. This time round if you aggro up a gang and their bosses they don’t just get mad on their little plot of land – they will hunt you down,” Neumann said. “And this can happen at any time. You can be in the middle of a boss fight with one faction and suddenly have to deal with retaliation from another. It’s absolute chaos, but it’s a super fun sandbox.”

Neumann hopes Crackdown 3 will revolutionise the way developers think about making games and believes the future potential for cloud-powered gaming is almost limitless. “For all of us who have been in game development for 25 years there are very few times when there’s something truly new, so distributed computing is like a gift,” he said.

“You can all of a sudden offload a whole bunch of things – in this case physics calculations – to the cloud and no matter where you are in the world, you get incredible performance, whatever machine you’re on. So if you’re using the original Xbox One or Xbox One X the destruction is the same for everybody.”

“This opens up the door for all kinds of things. I can’t wait to see what people do with the cloud. You can run your AI up there, you can run simulations up there. The scope of what we can do with distributed CPUs is awesome and [Crackdown 3] is just an example. I really think it’s the beginning of something.”

Crackdown 3 is released on Xbox One and Windows PC on February 15.