Gaga: Five Foot Two

9/23/17. This is the way to do a music biopic! Non-fawning, warts and all look at one of the biggest stars of today. Beneath all the glitter, meat dress included, she is a down-home NYC girl. She has her moments and she has her pain, but so far she has managed to balance her life, expressing herself in her music and outrageous fashion statements. She does appear to have some mental health issues that hopefully will not overwhelm her. As for her feud with Madonna? Lady Gaga is by far the better person and much more talented than Madonna. (Like she actually plays instruments!) Madonna thrived on shock value. While Madonna was a good concert performer, as a person she was condescending, petty and overbearing. Just watch Truth and Dare. Keep in mind that most artists start off imitating their heroes as homage than intentionally ripping off the works of people they admire. This is what Madonna accused Lady Gaga of doing. Well, Gaga has found her voice early on and it's a beautiful one.

So here's the deal. I haven't ever really been a huge Lady Gaga fan. I grew up listening to her music but I never really felt like she was ever in it for anything but shock value. I just never really understood the appeal .... until I watched a star is born. That movie was one of, if not my favorite movies of the year and I very much enjoyed Gaga's role in it and her acting abilities. The only problem was : now I wanted to like lady Gaga but I felt like she was exactly who her character ended up being in the end of a star is born and I wanted the down to earth woman from the beginning.

I watched Gaga: five foot two after the shallow Oscar performance because I wanted to see who Gaga really is and I feel like this movie really does that. It was very cool to see her at that point in her life emotionally and physically dealing with a lot. It takes place when she performed at the super bowl halftime show and shows her signing off to star in a star is born. She struggles with so much in this movie but she also has some break throughs, amazing performances, and people who pick her up when she's down.

Overall I felt like she gave a raw and real look into her life and I finally feel like I'm beginning to like Lady Gaga. Not for the pop star version of what she's expected to be like but for the actual person she is.

One thing I really liked about this documentary is how it so often uses a musical and visual way to document her life, as opposed to a verbal narrative. It uses seamless camera and editing tactics to portray the events and her possible emotional states in a way that can't be accurately described with words, which essentially served the purpose of this documentary. We get a glimpse into the life of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, which is a stark contrast to her artistic persona as Ladygaga, a couple of scenes in this documentary depicts that. Joanne is such a sweet soul, and from this documentary we learn that every human being has struggles, even for a successful big star like Ladygaga, and that there are so many layers within one human being, her artistic stage persona does not fully represent her as a human being.

These types of documentaries always interest me, regardless if they were actually any good or needed to be made. Many people will dislike a movie like this simply because they will think it is just a way to make more money for a whole of people that already have tonnes of money. Or the problems they face aren't really problems, and watching someone whinge about how hard their life is when they have a mansion and millions of followers is excruciating. But I find it quite captivating. In many ways I think these movies capture quite a clear extract of modern pop culture and share it with the world. I find it educating to see how someone like Lady Gaga lives her life, what her day to day looks like, what annoys her or what gets her excited, or what someone of this fame's values are. Most of the time I come away from a movie like this, thankful I'm not famous, or a pop star, thankful that I have my own quiet place with a handful of people that care about me, and I was again in this viewpoint after watching Gaga.

She shares an insight on what it is like to work for producers and some of the power plays going on behind the scenes that just seem so twisted and power hungry as she shares about the dynamics at play when men with lots of money can ask for whatever they want. It's no wonder that the #Metoo movement was exposing many people like this, and long may it continue.

Alongside this Gaga also displays many of her inner traumas as she is processing her break up with her fiance and trying to return to preforming while coming back from a hip injury. You can quite clearly see the mental weight of keeping up with trends, of trying to find yourself, of being secure, or doing what you feel you were made to do. All things that Gaga is trying to put her own spin on. She decides that this is because she's become a woman and not a girl anymore, that its something to do with age. But I think this clearly shows that fame can just prolong maturity, that she lost her sense of herself in her fame of 21, 22. She didn't know what she wanted and just went with what she was told. Compared to her now deciding what she wants. This is something I feel like, I'm able to do sooooo much easier, at a much younger age, and that becoming famous in your early 20s at a time of such change, insecurity and identity development is actually such a burden, something that can take years to unravel.

So this doco, is a bit strange, but as I've said uncovers quite a hidden world and really shows that fame and fortune are really just a huge disappointment and to put your hope in them is a terrible idea. Great to watch the doco from this point of view, any other view and its just ok.

The film does not hesitate to reduce the quality of the recordings by cell phone recordings from the private life of the pop queen. It is precisely this directness that defines the honesty of the film. Lady Gaga up close. The documentary is nicely told but, above all, made easy.