Home Entertainment Clint Eastwood's remake of A Star Is Born is actually about Kurt Cobain

Clint Eastwood's remake of A Star Is Born is actually about Kurt Cobain

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Well, kind of. While at the press junket for The Lucky One (another dose of Nicholas Sparks penned literary ipecac), screenwriter Will Fetters spoke to CraveOnline about veteran actor turned director Clint Eastwood’s remake and revealed that deceased grunge rock legend, Kurt Cobain, was actually the inspiration for lead character, Norman Maine.

“I think I’ve reinvented the Norman Maine character, the lead. I wanted to do ‘A Star is Born’ because I’m a huge Kurt Cobain fan. That was like my Kennedy assassination when I was a teenager. When he died it was a huge horrible thing. So I approached ‘A Star is Born,’ for me the framework was all right, if Kurt Cobain never got to go Unplugged and survived and it’s 20 years later and it’s now, and he wanted to try to do that album with that understanding as this grunge icon. That’d be tough to get done if he was past his prime, no longer selling, how does he get that album?”

If you’re struggling to get past all the sentence fragments, basically he’s saying that Norman Maine is who Kurt Cobain would have been had he not got intimate with the business end of a shotgun nearly two decades ago. There’s been significant talk that Warner Bros is looking at Tom Cruise for the role, which I feel could actually work quite well. Snacking on placentas and couch jumping aside, you cannot deny the talent of the man. He is undoubtedly capable of bringing the required level of turmoil and emotional gravitas that an older Cobain would have possessed. And with Eastwood at the helm, it could make for a very a dramatic turn.

My concern though, still lies in the choice of professional screecher Beyonce Knowles as the up and coming young songstress who falls in love with her older mentor, a has-been rock star far past his prime.

I wasn’t as enamoured as some with her performance in Dreamgirls. While not horrid, it was just passably average and relying a lot on her co-stars and the film’s music to carry her. When required to stand alone and deliver a more dramatic performance sans singing in 2009’s Obsessed – admittedly a predictable crapfest all around – she fell woefully short of the mark. And now, in this fourth remake of the famous tale, she’s stepping into the shoes of such screen icons as Judy Garland and Barbara Streisand?

Yeah, I don’t see it ending well.

 

Last Updated: April 2, 2012

One Comment

  1. Geoffrey Tim

    April 2, 2012 at 14:59

    What kind of rocker name is “Norman?”

    Reply

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