Star!
|
List Price: Our Price: $4.57 You Save: $5.41 (54%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $2.15 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Star!
Movie Review: Endless but diverting
Summary: 3 Stars
I watched this nearly 3 hour movie in one hour segments, 2 hours yesterday, the last of it just now. I found it paradoxical. I did not like it, yet I did not notice the time going by. It was about the most (to me) glittering era of show biz history, yet it was like champagne that has gone flat. I won't keep my copy, I will give it away. I don't want it and don't want to see it again. Noel Coward's part didn't come alive for me until near the middle, of course, he wasn't in the flick much before then either. And I thought both Andrews and Massey botched the 2 Coward show snippets they tried to recreate. With Andrews at the helm, the musical numbers of course were good, but (sigh) they weren't wonderful. I thought Richard Crenna overacted and was pompous and stodgy, not strong and decisive which his character seemed to imply. There was very little humor in this movie despite the fact that Noel Coward had so much to do with the story. I thought (like this review) that it just went no where for about 3 hours. An interesting note. It came out the same year as Funny Girl, and like Funny Girl, in the beginning when Lawrence was trying to break into show biz, she botches her number in the chorus and trips the other girls (by entangling them in the long wrapping from the leg of her military uniform, this the "Oh What a Lovely War" number), but the audience loves her. Brice does the same thing in the beginning of Funny Girl, only she does it on roller skates. I did not like The Sound of Music either, but preferred Star! infinitely to that. I thought the best thing about it was the title song, particularly the lyric written by Samy Cahn of all people. He was no Larry Hart, but I thought those words were delightful. Like I said, I found it a paradoxical movie. I didn't like it, I was bored, yet it held my interest and I do not want to see it again.Movie Review: The film is great, but the DVD is not...
Summary: 3 Stars
I've long been a fan of this big budget, roadshow musical from 1968. STAR! is the fictionalized biography of the great stage star, Gerturde Lawrence, and Julie Andrews was quite the perfect talent to help embody Lawrence on screen. Robert Wise and associates did exhaustive research and planning to make a film that was theatrical in nature, while providing plenty of opportunities for their star to shine. Spectacularly designed, staged, costumed, jewelled, scored, photographed, and presented, STAR! was a large box-office and critical disappointment in 1968, and was whittled down to a mere shadow of itself over the years. Finally, in the mid-1980s, people began rediscovering this musical via a complete, roadshow print that began making the revival-house rounds. Fox Video held a 25th anniversary, 70mm re-premier in 1993, and then put it onto videocassette (pan and scan, a disaster) and a superlative laserdisc edition that was mastered from the original wide-format Todd-AO elements. This DVD release does the film another disservice in that it is washed out, poorly framed (it seems as if picture information is missing from both sides), and the carefully constructed black and white sequences given an "Oz"-like sepia wash that was never intended. The film's overture is present, but the intermission, entr'acte, and final play-out music are missing (they were fully in place on the laserdisc), further diluting Wise's carefully stylized theatrical presentation. The movie is great, and the sound on the DVD is exapnsively wide, but the picture quality has been destroyed, and the excision of the reserved-seat accoutrements shows that not a lot of thought went into this DVD version. Very, very sad treatment for such a vibrant, entertaining, and long-neglected piece of silver screen history.Movie Review: Top Julie,Average Movie
Summary: 3 Stars
Noel Coward said of this movie,"It will undoubtedly be a marvelous commercial film,and Julie Andrews and Danny willbe wonderful;so will all those nostalgic,unforgettable songs.
But it won't bear the slightest possible resemblance to the
Gertie we knew".Coward,who was one of Gertrude Lawrence's best
friends and wrote some of Daniel Massey's(who played him)dialogue,was so right!"STAR!" is two films in one.First,it's
basically nothing more than a routine Hollywood musical biogrpahy,full of more fiction than fact.Robert Wise,Saul
Chaplin, and Twentieth Century-Fox spent far too much money on
the sumptuous sets and costumes(which do look beautiful in
Ernest Laszlo's gorgeous Technicolor photography).They should
have spent it on William Fairchild's banal script.And who said
it had to be three hours?Wise and editor William Reynolds should
have cut it by at least one hour.
But secondly, "STAR!" is also a Julie Andrews star vehicle, and
on that level it works.Vocally and dramatically,this is one of
Julie's best performances.Although she was wrong for the part
due to differences in voice and personality, Julie is winning
and winsome here.And she's never looked better on film!And,oh,
that soundtrack!Gershwin,Porter,Weill,and the others have rarely
been perfromed so well(magnificent work by arranger/conductor
Lennie Hayton and his crew!).
All in all,though, this is just a typical big-budget 1960s musical-entertaining for an evening,but nothing more.Not the
horror most critics and fans called it,but not a classic,either.
For a much better musical bio,try Doris Day's "Love Me Or Leave
Me".
Movie Review: A good try, but in the end, a failure
Summary: 3 Stars
Robert Wise usually makes some good movies, but this one just reeks of a studio system misfiring on every level. And then he went on to make TWO PEOPLE with Lindsay Wagner and Estelle Parsons, a mock-indie location movie in the mode of EASY RIDER (and employing Peter Fonda as a repentant draft dodger) which seemed to prove he couldn't do the anti-studio thing either. What a shame, because it looks like Julie Andrews was really putting everything she had into her performance! Maybe if the movie was about a fictional stage actress of the 20s and 30s it might have worked--but then why not make it about a fictional actress of the 1960s, i.e., make it truly contemporary? I expect the reason is that the studio saw money in a period piece, even though it had already weathered a series of huge financial period flops from CLEOPATRA to DOCTOR DOOLITTLE.
Yes, Julie is terribly miscast as Gertrude Lawrence, but at the same time she's awfully good; maybe it's fairer to say that Gertrude Lawrence is not the right part for Julie. And what was the idea of casting Richard Crenna in the man's role? Yuck! He's straight from TV! I remember seeing STAR! as a child with my grandmother, and she clucked her head going in, saying that any movie that had to had an exclamation point in its title was reeking of desperation. Grandma, you were right as usual.
The title song is terrific though.
Movie Review: Great - but where's the entire film?
Summary: 3 Stars
I was a fan of Star when I first saw it in 1968. I was a fan when I purchased the Laser Disk in 2000. When I purchased the DVD, I was very happy with the quality of the disk until the Intermission Break and Entr'acte Music, both are missing from the DVD disk. There is a pause where these items should be and then a slight bleeping noise and then the film continues. A small thing, but they are a part of the original film. The film makers' intentions have been altered. The Laser Disk clocks in at 176 minutes (with Intermission and Entr'acte Music) and the DVD at 172 minutes. Are the 4 minutes missing because the DVD was not released on 2 disks and therefore ran out of space? Was there carelessness in the transfer? What is the answer?
For this important film (minor but important), I feel that Twentieth Century Fox Home Video skimped with this product. Doesn't this film warrant a deluxe packaging? Yes, the second side of the DVD disk has all the special material from the Laser Disk but side 1 does not have the entire film. The product is unbalanced.
The complete film should have been preserved on DVD for future generations. Hopefully it will be released by a vender such as Criterion which seems to have more integrity with their products then the producers of this imperfect disk.