Birdman: or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (2014)

"Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige, my friend." -Mike Shiner

"You are not IMPORTANT!, get used to it." -Sam Riggan

Ït feels wrong to give a score to Birdman with any kind of scale or using any kind of metrics. (I'm not going to.) The entire thesis of the film is that art is art is art and should not be judged except in its authenticity. If it has substance and courage it is good.  If you like it is not an acceptable measurement. People like explosions, sex, magic powers, dragons, pretty people, outrage, and cats. Fish in a barrel.  Art does not require an audience or the approval of one.

Then we get into the heart of the film and its not subtle allegory: All of that is wrong. Art requires financing, marketing, star power, critiques, comparisons, measurements, and above all an audience that appreciates it.  Without those things art does not exist.  Art is there for an elusive cat in a box: both particle and wave: neither, either, or both.

My soul falls into the category of pure art. I write this blog.  It has meaning for me. I don't care who reads it, and it turns out that basically no one in the vastness of the internets does. (appx 5000 page views in 5 years.) -That said, this space is for reviewing others' art with measurements, and the hypocrisy of that is not lost on me.

My head tells me I am an idiot. So, here are some cats and explosions to drive up my popularity.   

I short, I think Birdman; and its pretentious after title that I assume was meant to make critical audiences think about Birdman and Dr. Stranglove in the same sentence, is quality. However, I don't understand the how or why of its own existence.  If there are two sides to this philosophical argument. Birdman cannot be both.  Therefore, it cannot exist.  But, it does.  My mind is warped. I like that it exists.

On technical elements, Birdman is a modern day aberration; few cuts, shots that are 5+ minutes, actors that have to time their re-entrances perfectly theater style (complete with costume changes), and a fully realized multi-layer set. My hunch is that this is all a deliberate choice by the film makers to run the opposite direction of everything else recently put on film.  I find this to be refreshing and of quality.  I am sure others with lower attention spans didn't even make it to the bottom this review to disagree with me. Here's some pretty people and dragons.

 

Birdman: or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance *Special guest duel review by None More Black (2014)

Birdman

Hello “Don’t take what I say seriously readers” your normal correspondent has graciously allowed me to step in a present a guest review so without further ado

Birdman: Or the Unexpected Virtues of Ignorance

When I first heard about this movie my initial thought was that Birdman from Cash Money Millionaires, wait Billionaires, had made a movie about his career as a rap mogul.   Boy I am glad that I was way off base. 

Instead of being a crass ode to materialism from the originator of the phrase “bling, bling”  Birdman was an exquisite study of aging, family, and the role of art.

In the interest of full disclosure, I saw this movie as the lone patron of an arty theatre on a Wednesday night in Duluth Minnesota.  A theater by the way that offered a full bar of tasty locals brews to those lucky enough to find this cinematic Valhalla in the basement of what looked to be a abandoned brick factory.  So my review may come off as unnecessarily fawning perhaps even giddy.   Rest assured I am not an Inarritu fan boy, I hated 21 grams.  Blame the alcohol and solitude if you must, but I loved the Birdman.

To begin, magical realism I feel is a dangerous aesthetic to play with.  There are many examples both in literature and cinema of stories that have gone disastrously off the rails in this genre.  Recent examples include Haruki Mukami’s painful new novel Colorless Tsuru Tasaki,  the execrable Beasts of the Southern Wild.  Why Birdman succeeds where others have failed is that the movie takes pains to keep the reality aspect of magical realism front and center.   Michael Keatons character may float in the air, but he has real and relatable problems.  Birdman does an amazing job of balancing these two forces drawing the viewer into the experience such that when “magical” things happen they seem truly magical. 

           

One tactic used to splendid effect to ground the movie is amazing use of cinematography creating the illusion that the entire movie was shot in one take.  This grounds the movie both geographically as the camera floats throughout the New York theater where most of the movie takes place, but temporally as well using shadows to mark the passage of time during a segue filmed against a brick backdrop.

Connected to this even the soundtrack is a used a tool to ground the viewer.  I couldn’t help but smile when the jazz drummer creating the beat occasionally shows up on screen.  This attempt to blur the lines of reality could come off as tacky in the hands of a less skilled director, production team, and actors, like a so many failed shoot wrestling angles which end up just making the audience uncomfortable.    

Due to this part of the excitement of watching the movie for me was the meta tension inherent in such an ambitious project. I felt like one wrong misstep and the whole movie would come apart at the seams revealing it as a trite mess, but from opening shot to the final brilliant ambiguous ending, and all of the jellyfish in between Birdman came through brilliantly. 

To quantify a movie that works to be unquantifiable I give Birdman 4.5 out of 5 units

(The choice of unit is up to you)