The opening shot finds Michael Keaton floating in midair in what turns out to be an ancient run down theater on Broadway. The room is cluttered with junk and Michael hears the voice of a movie character he played twenty years ago. The voice tells him he was a god and he threw it all away.
Birdman is a brilliantly fun film. We have the story of a has-been actor whose last great role was playing a superhero and is now doing a daring project to try and reclaim a bit of his former glory. He ends up working with Ed Norton, who plays a pain in the ass actor that is brilliant, but who no one can stand working with. I don’t know enough about the rest of the cast to know if they are playing themselves or not, but these two bits of business are pure gold.
There are a lot of camera and narrative tricks going on. The film is shot to give the illusion that the camera never goes off and that Birdman is one really long take. There are a lot special effects. Flying and floating and things blowing up happen now and then. Birdman likes to be preachy in it’s awe of The Theater, while it is in fact just a crappy Hollywood movie starring the very self righteous bastards it proclaims to hate. But that’s kind of what Broadway has become, isn’t it? One Disney Production after another.
There are a lot of cool shots and silly gags. One joke was lifted right out of the cartoon Daria, where Daria was trapped on the roof with a football player and moans-Great, now the headline will read Football Star and others died in storm. Michael had similar thoughts when he found himself on a plane with Clooney.
In the end, it’s hard to tell reality from the world in our hero’s mind. Is he really a god or is he really dead or was the whole thing just a dream? I especially liked the drummer who would appear out of nowhere to deliver the odd riffs that accompany our hero’s madness.
Birdman was interesting and well worth watching.
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