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)

Rocky Balboa (2006)

"Yeah....I think I gotta little left, you know...some stuff in the basement." -Rocky Balboa

So my local cable affiliate in South East Asia took this week to show all the Rocky movies.  I caught some of most of them. I purposefully did not watch Rocky V -It is aweful-, but I did watch all of Rocky Balboa.

Here's the review:  Did you ever wish Rocky V just didn't happen and that there was a film that made up for that fatty taste on the top of your mouth that ended the Rocky franchise....? Well...Rocky Balboa is the film for you.  It is not bad.  It is everything that Rocky V should have been.  A polite, cliche, slightly endearing echo of former glory. I recommend it. It has the songs. People chant "Rocky! Rocky! Rocky!", and the montage of him bulking up is right in line with what we all expect. New cast members of Geraldine Hughs and Milo Ventimiglia (Peter from Heroes) were acceptable.

Enjoy it for what it is.

On a scale of Rocky and Bullwinkle to Rocky Road, I give Rocky Balboa 2.7 out of 5 stars.

Runner Runner (2013)

"If I am being honest.  I would do it again." -Ivan Block

"wait DJ Deadmau5 and the dad from Home Alone in one movie?" -Me

"ehhhh...I'm just to tired to change the channel or turn it off." -Me

In this blog I often remark that I genuinely attempt to keep my movie watching to films that are at minimum only a waste of time.  I can then feel good that they were not a waste of life. Fortunately for me, I was already wasting my life, of my own accord, being too tired to leave the couch or move while being subjected to Runner Runner.  If I had paid money to watch it, I would have asked for my time back.

I will give credit where credit is due though.  There was about a 90 second segment of the film dedicated to the carnival party thrown by big bad Ivan Block (Ben Affleck) that was borderline Fillini-esque.  It was weird.  It was colorful. It was creepy. It was set to the beats of DJ Deadmau5. Then it ended and that was the best part of Runner Runner.

Cons:
Justin Timberlake:  I'm not sure if you only have one character to play, and I am willing to give you another chance...but please work harder.

Writers:  The coolest part of this movie might have been the math.  I may be a minority, but any movie that shuns actual math the way Runner Runner does and then goes out of its way to use math as its legitimacy crutch should have paid more attention to the math.  Lines in this movie include things like. "Non-weighted, game theory, dude!" and "These number are more than 3sigma out of wack man."  If you are going to use these terms...best explain them....not just dangle them there to sound smart.  -for the record in one scene they talk about the stat odds of something being comparable to winning the powerball multiple times.  One data point outside of 3sigma is not unheard of. It generally happens once out of every 1000 times also know as 1/1000 or .1%  which is orders of magnitude different than winning the powerball multiple times.

In summary, writers, math is cool. Please don't make it play a negligible role in your soulless movie about the hollowness of money and corruption.

On a scale of millenia to parsecs, I give Runner Runner 1.8 out of 5 stars.

Hector and the Search for Happiness (2014)

"Preamble...preamble...gotta work on my preamble." -Hector

"Sweet Potato Stew!!!!"  -So many people

This movie proves my rule that if Simon Pegg is in a film.  I will in all likelyhood enjoy it. Something about him on screen is just magnetic.

As to Hector and the search for happiness. I personally detest the internet mantra that negativity gets clicks or interest:  -Buzzfeed top 10 things wrong with American Sniper. -The real problem with Obama's state of the union. -13 horribly racist things from last week. and on and on.  However, I will break from my above bashing to take Hector and the Search for Happiness to the cleaner on one point.

Africa is a continent not a country. It's like saying, "I'm going to North America." and then spending all of your time in suburbs of Winnapeg. The film deliberately goes on a grand adventure to specific places like Shanghai, Tibet, and Los Angeles...and then goes to Africa. Not a specific nation, region, or city. Just Africa.  And the film repeats this often.  I might add that in "Africa" our hero immediately gets in a conversation with a drug lord. This then proves important as he gets abducted by unnamed bad men with guns. His only recourse to release is through his drug lord connection. I don't have so much a problem with the story as a problem with the idea that this experience speaks for an entire continent that stretches from Egypt to Mauritania to South Africa. 1.1 Billion people. This may have come directly from the book..but I do not abide the perpetuation of this long held geographical farce.

Apart from the above point, Hector and the Search for Happiness was a pretty good movie. But, I am not likely to watch it again. I liked the cast, the messages, the script, and especially the book with all the drawings and one liners about happiness that tied the story together. I also think that we should all expect to see Ming Zhao in more movies.  She played her part perfectly.  @Christopher Plummer and Stellan Skarsgard. You were on screen for may be 15 minutes a piece and stole the show.

On a scale of despair to elation, I give Hector and the Search for Happiness 2.88 out of 5 stars.

*I've really notice that my new scoring system will bring down the scores from here on out. A purely average film will get 2.5 stars.  If you are an avid reader please make note of this change going forward.