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Birdman (new Alejandro González Iñárritu film)

Started by Noodle Lizard, December 01, 2014, 02:39:37 AM

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Noodle Lizard

I read that this morning too.  I can only imagine they're kidding, in which case it's really funny.  If not ... fuck knows.  Just glad they saw sense.

Johnny Textface

Re: the ending, I don't think there's anything more in it than a writer and director continuing to be playful with the medium right to the end.  As well as everything else, this film is, to me, about the joy of filmmaking and the seemingly limitless potential of a human imagination


Loved it, but like some have said, wasn't moved by it.

Overall, very Gondry. 8.7/10

TrenterPercenter

Usually my kind of thing and was really looking forward to it.

Found, as mentioned, past the fluidity and rhythm it was pretty dire and cliched to fuck.  The ending was ter-ra-bull and what came before was basically well made pretentious crap.

2 stars.

small_world

Won the Oscar then.

I only saw it this weekend, didn't really get all of the hype. It's got a lot of things I enjoy, so I'm not really sure where it fell down for me.

I loved the constant/continuous pace thing. The events of a few days/weeks following consecutively as if everything happened over a couple of hours.
This was really helped along by the drum track playing in the background for most of the film. And again, that's something I've liked in other films - One of the best things about Walk The Line the Johnny Cash film was, for me, that guitar freight train picking at the start then coming back at the end.
Then actually having the drummer outside the theatre was a good nod/kind of 4th wall break. Having him in the theatre in that last act was good too. Not too much and again, was part of the theme of the film by that stage.

Little bits of that type of thing were really good and helped to make the film interesting.
But it still seemed to lack something.
I thought the characters were interesting, I liked the plot and the storylines and how they weren't too explicitly pressed or driven, but seemed urgent at the same time.

There was just something missing for me.

The only thing I thought of, was that it reminded me a lot of Synecdoche: New York.
That film did perfectly what I thought was trying to be done here.

The Masked Unit

I watched it with the wife and picked up that she wasn't enjoying it, which in turn hampered my ability to focus, but I thought the performances were excellent all round, and from a technical standpoint, I was slack-jawed. Very keen on seeing more behind the scenes stuff.

Buttress

Oscar for this. Noice choice. But I'm still not sure I was fully convinced by it, still enjoyed it heaps tho.

Tiny Poster

Saw this on Monday, enjoyed it enough but it was a bit up it's own arse and (probably because it was set at a theatre) so bloody theatrical. You know, all those monologues and general "aaahh do you see what we are doing here? Why we cast them? What this scene is about? Do you?" smugness that permeates the entire thing. Even the meta-awareness around it, like Tim Riggins willing plot elements into motion... Shudder.

phantom_power

I was expecting it to be smug but didn't find it to be at all. It has a pretty rounded view of things, showing all sides of the various issues without coming down on any side really.

Tiny Poster

I'm not too bothered about the issues or meaning, I'm talking about the form - all the theatre-type speeches where people explain their relationships to each other and their feelings and exposition and look at this interesting visual metaphor! Do you see? Do you?

phantom_power

Yeah, I still didn't really get any of that. It didn't insist upon itself, to misquote Family Guy

Al Tha Funkee Homosapien

I wanted to hate this film and found it slightly insufferable until Ed Norton turned up. But then I really went with it and enjoyed it very much so. As mentioned before the ending is KRAP and the female 'characters' are pretty dire.

The flying sequence was so much like dreams I've had of flying/falling that it made me feel a tad weird, but I'm sure that's a common reaction.

Yeah, Ed Norton was brilliant and inspired me to keep watching after a shaky opening 15 minutes. My feeling about the film on the whole was summed up nicely by the closing of a letterboxd review:

Quotehow many mid-life crises are going to be made into major hollywood films before they start realizing I DON'T GIVE A FUCK.

Beagle 2

I liked the fact that things like the kiss didn't 'go anywhere', they didn't need to. I thought it succeeded in its aims of being funny and truthful about actors, fantasists and egomaniacs. I don't think the the gun stuff was at all necessary, I don't think we needed any resolution on how the reviews had gone nor the final cop-out uncertainty about what was and wasn't fantasy. I would have cut out the loading of the gun and ended it before the gunshot. That would have made me happy.

Still, what a movie.

Hank Venture

Great film, but a bit too clever and a bit too up its own arse.

The Dissolve reviewer was not a fan: https://thedissolve.com/reviews/1152-birdman/

BritishHobo

Weird to see the thread resurface, as I'm rewatching at the moment, and I've been seeking out negative reviews for absolutely no reason beyond deliberately pissing myself off.

Something I notice most people coming to is the idea that Birdman is all about 'art' being good, and comic book movies being shit for cunts, but I don't get that at all. Despite what an arsehole Shiner is, what a fucking blowhard he comes across as boasting about the truth in his acting, I do get the feeling that Riggan doesn't care about the play itself as much as he does, only what the play means in a cultural context, for Riggan's career. The reason he picks Carver isn't because he believes in the story, it's because Carver was aware of him as an actor. It's a vanity thing. It might as well be Birdman 4, because the end goal is the same; a life where Riggan wouldn't be Farrah Fawcett if he died on the same day as Michael Jackson. In the end, it's neither of those things that do it - ironically despite him earlier mocking Sam and her generation's desire to go 'viral', it's Riggan running naked through Times Square and then shooting himself in the face on-stage that does it.

It's probably laid out entirely by that motto Riggan has on his dressing-room mirror: 'A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing'. And it's a message he repeatedly misses the point of. The play is primarily to bolster his reputation, he conflates his wife's opinion of a shitty comedy he did with her actual feelings towards him, the only time he pays any attention to his girlfriend is when he thinks she's carrying his child. Refinancing the house Sam's supposed to get, and getting her off pot, he only sees those things as affecting him, and the 'important thing' he's trying to do. They're all just obstacles to him in an attempt to find some kind of meaning out of his existence; like Shiner, almost raping his wife on stage, trying to find 'truth' just makes him a cunt who fucks up everything that's actually real.

I don't think it makes any real statement on art vs pop culture, more the motivations of the people behind them. And it reserves a lot more venom for those involved in the former than the latter.

Noodle Lizard

Exactly.  I really don't see how anyone could draw the conclusion that Riggan's supposed to be some kind of hero in all this.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about this film is that, unlike most big blockbusters (and especially Oscar winners), there really aren't any heroes. 

Wow that's quite heavy already isn't it?

BritishHobo

I notice a lot of people using the critic as an example of the film's bias against pop-culture, but I find that a weird conflation. She's presented in a really negative light - elitist, unreasonable, dishonest, and Riggan tears her apart in response. In fact it's probably the only place the film falls down for me, because she's so cartoonish as a villain, she is literally Anton Ego from Ratatouille.

Puce Moment

Despite the fact that I think Biutiful is an excellent film I find myself agreeing with that reviewer. I think 21 Grams was an eye-opener for me in terms of seeing how earnestly pretentious Iñárritu can be, and particular the comment about his inability to modulate. In many ways Birdman is a development of that as it is far more structured than his previous films, which to some extent have relied on portmanteau plotting.

Dex Sawash

Just watched this Saturday , been working through the thread to try to figure out what I saw.

Kind of thought the coda may all be
Spoiler alert
postmortem fantasy
[close]
including the
Spoiler alert
thunderous applause and good review
[close]

I don't normally think about films after except "it was good/it was shit" don't really have the thought vocabulary to really analyze.
Just a little troubled that I didn't get it, may bangwatch again.