A Star Is Born

70mm screens have been filled with some vacuous stuff in their time, but this monstrous remake takes the biscuit. It's set in the rock world, but the kind of rock these people peddle is the softest thing next to jelly. And the embarrassment when Streisand gets to shake her loins in rhythm...Kristofferson is much better as the fading drunkard who promotes and marries the rising star. Apart from the flash new environment, this version vaunts its modernity by vulgarising everything in sight, making the characters mouthpieces for foul language and equally foul sentimentality. Maybe Brian De Palma in his Phantom of the Paradise days could have wrested a film from all this, but Pierson (replacing Jerry Schatzberg, Streisand's hairdresser Jon Peters, and probably a million others) just lets it hang out, uncoordinated and ridiculous.