Birdman ou (La Surprenante vertu de l'ignorance)

A washed-up ex-superhero actor is trying to make a mark on Broadway. Unfortunately, his new found want to make 'something serious', as opposed to superhero films, is challenged by the inability to shake his old persona.

It's a film about Hollywood and its many personalities - the drug-addicted, the mentally unwell, the sexual abusers, the egotistical, the scathing critics, the stars and the has-beens. It's not a topic I particularly care for and I didn't enjoy Tarantino's 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' or Alma Har'el/Shia Lebeouf's 'Honey Boy'.

Birdman, however, hypnotised me. You're greeted by snaking, daydream-like single shots that seem stretch forever, one scene flowing effortlessly into another through a combination of clever camera work, editing, and special effects. In short, it's a cinematographic dream. The high-conflict scenes, action, script, and larger than life characters glue your eyes to the screen in this rollercoaster that's effortless to watch. For a film about Hollywood, you'd expect good acting, and it certainly didn't disappoint, whether from Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, or the rest of the talented cast.

Birdman thrusts you into supernaturalism briefly, before thrusting you back to reality. It leaves it up to you how to interpret some key events and this creates division within the audience.

I understand why some dislike the film. I didn't find it meaningful, deep, or clear to what its message was. However, its punchy style was refreshingly new, worked perfectly, and is reason alone for cinephiles to delve into this engaging whirlwind of a film.

Whilst viewing 'Birdman', I spent the first hour of the film trying to decipher my emotions and opinions towards it, what I was watching was a weird, yet wonderful work of art. Truly though, 'Birdman' is a technical masterpiece. Michael Keaton has generally been undermined as an actor (despite a few notable roles as Batman or Beetlejuice) and has instead faced Hollywood picking more acclaimed and popular actors, 'Birdman' however might just be his ticket to an Oscar nomination, and possibly even a win, his performance is mesmerising. Alejandro González Iñárritu has created a truly spectacular character study that arguably features this year's strongest acting performances, alongside a well- executed script, booming soundtrack and a monumental achievement with cinematography from Emmanuel Lubezki in which he attempts a Hitchcockian approach, reminiscent of 'Rope', and displays the story through a seemingly single and unbroken sweeping shot. This is the true definition of a masterpiece.

I have a tendency to check user reviews on IMDb before watching a film. I was surprised to see how divided people were for Birdman. Most of the reviews were either 9-10 stars or 1 star. This made me want to watch the film even more and by the time I finished watching it, my faith in people had decreased by a little bit.

Birdman is brilliant! This is not just an opinion, I wouldn't even consider it as one of my favourite films, I didn't even give 10 stars. When I say it is brilliant, I don't mean that I liked it too much, I mean that every aspect of the film is masterfully dealt with. Sublime acting, excellent cinematography, interesting and unconventional directing and a wonderfully original score. OK there wasn't a fast-paced plot with lots of plot twists, but not every movie has to be like this. One of the reviewers who gave one star complained about the plot and suggested to the readers to go watch a Kubrick film instead. Well, Kubrick himself made movies with minimal plot which were nevertheless proved to be masterpieces (2001: A space Odyssey, Eyes Wide Shut). He once said: "A film is (or should be) more like music than fiction". Films are supposed to make us think and feel, like music does. You can make a good song by adding story-like lyrics and you can make a good song by adding no lyrics at all. The same applies to movies. There are plot-driven masterpieces and there are no-plot- driven masterpieces. Birdman is one of the latter.

I don't want to spoil the film. I just want to say that I would highly recommend it for anyone, except people who only want to see pointless action and superhero films. Birdman will make you think, reflect on similar situations you might have experienced and discover the other side of actors and films. I can absolutely understand people not liking it. There is not a single film that appeals to everyone. What I cannot understand though is people calling it a bad movie.

I'll start by saying this movie is worth seeing at least once, at least to see what it is doing. It is shot much like Hitchcock's *Rope*, though not exactly. It isn't all one shot, but there are many shots that flow from scene to scene. The catch? Those scenes are not always chronologically continuous. This is a fact you very well might miss if you are distracted or have something inhibiting you (the theatre I watched it in first however many years ago had abysmal audio, so this was me the first time).

This may sound disorienting, but if you change the way you are viewing the movie, I think it will help. Don't look at it as a standard movie: instead, view it as a stage play whose stage is an entire neighborhood, mostly one building, and which was mostly captured as it was being performed by a cameraman. This means that the actors moving in and out of scene have the same flow that a stage play has, and this also explains the presence of the drummer that you randomly see in the background performing the soundtrack to the movie. (Yes, the soundtrack is mostly a drummer; it works really well somehow.)

There's only one tiny wrench in this, the movie has all sorts of elements that are generally assumed to be hallucinations or imaginings of the main character (Keaton). In different scenes where he is alone, we see him using various telekinetic powers. Occasionally, we actually see his younger self as Birdman (an action-movie role from his younger days) in person, although usually he just antagonizes him via voice over. Some of the few hard cuts in the movie that do not follow an actor from one room to another are used to establish that the telekinesis in the previous scene is probably just Keaton throwing stuff around the room in anger.

How to reconcile this is... well, difficult. It certainly plays with the tension between stage plays and movies. In neither is everything you see always taken literally, but in stage plays it is much more figurative (hence the bending of time and space from scene to scene). But on stage, you usually can't perform the kinds of special effects (characteristic of movies) that we are being asked not to take literally. (I'm trying to stay spoiler free, so I'll not say what I'm thinking right now.)

This is where we should look at the themes of the movie, because these formal elements in conflict that I mentioned mirror the thematic conflict between cinema and theatre. Long story short, the premise of the mov... (movie? . . . stageplay? . . . ) ...of the story is that Keaton is a has-been actor, known (very well known) for superhero movies he did ten or twenty years ago, all based around a character named Bat*coughs* I mean, Birdman.

Sound familiar? Okay, good. Well the inciting incident in the story is that he is trying to reclaim his career as an actor in general, and with it his artistic street-cred, so to speak, by writing (adapting), directing, and starring in a play. It is based on a novel by someone who encouraged him to be an actor when he was a child. Therefore, this isn't a move of cold calculation, trying to get famous again after years of not being as successful as he was as Birdman and therefore being artistically inauthentic, although he is certainly accused of this. But it is instead a very real attempt to reconnect with his younger, artistic self, before Birdman, which he sees as the inauthentic detour of his career and as not what he wants to be remembered for.

The conflict is, he seems to be finding that the film world doesn't translate to the stage world. He seems to be hitting the problem that there may not be such a thing as an "actor-in-general" but only two separate things called "stage-actor" and "screen-actor." On multiple occasions, this film criticizes the spectacles that saturate Hollywood and the celebrity culture it grows in the Petri dish of its award shows. Edward Norton plays his foil, someone else who finds himself on stage more than he does in his natural life, yet a stage insider, rather than a film one.

The film isn't all anti film culture, however. In many ways, film has its last laugh when we see that the kinds of things that make the theatre-world fall in love with you and fawn over your talent are superficial as well.

The formal conflict inherent in how the film is delivered therefore mirrors the thematic content that is being delivered, which is almost always the optimum result.

In other words, I have a lot of respect for this movie. I rate it 9 stars because that is how I say I think everyone should give it a fair chance.

With all due respect to Eastwood's American Sniper, the academy actually got it right with this pick for best picture. Every actor and actress in this given the space to breathe life into characters, every monologue and dialogue hits like a ton of bricks, every scene tries to get towards some fundamental truth of human nature only to have the next scene undermine that character and that purported truth. It's amazing that in the era of comic book universe movies that something like this can get made at all. An absolute must see before you die movie.