Birdman

[poliphilo]

Riggan Thompson can fly, only most of the time he's forgotten how.

That's the human condition in a nutshell.

Birdman is a breathless, hectic, mad, mad movie. As you probably know, the bulk of it- apart from a short prologue and epilogue- proceeds without any visible cuts. We sink, we rise, we swoop we soar, we are eternally charging down corridors to get from scene to scene. Occasionally time speeds up. We leave the theatre to plunge through Times Square, we go back in again. We transition from plane to plane of reality. It could feel like too, too much but, thankfully, it's also very funny. Michael Keaton gives the performance of a lifetime as a not particularly likeable version of himself and Ed Norton is tremendous as a method-acting scumbag.

Comments

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the review. I was wondering what it was about.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's about an actor who once played a famous caped superhero and had all of the advantages of superstardom who is now much older and struggling to create a better legacy, to make a meaningful contribution to theater by producing, directing, and acting in his first Broadway play.

It's a marvelous film, but the cleverness of the seeming-single-take approach, littered with lots of rather unforgiving extreme close-ups, can still be exhausting at times though it is, indeed, funny. It definitely plays off the similaritie between Riggan Thompson and the actual Michael Keaton, and it's probably not a coincidence that several of the players besides Keaton have themselves formerly been in various superhero movies.